Timespanner visits the Wynyard Quarter

Wynyard Quarter, on one of Auckland's 20th century reclamations, was officially opened to the public on 6 August this year. I was at a meeting in Avondale that day so couldn't go -- but I knew I'd get a bit of a chance later on. Well, that chance was today.

First thing you see from the end of Quay Street (it's advertised as a five minute walk from Britomart. Expect it to be 10 minutes if no boats want to get out to sea from the marinas) is this striped pattern on the pavement. At least, it helps you not to get lost.

Heading towards Te Wero, Auckland's artificial island linking the Viaduct with Wynyard Quarter and the first of two bridges. No sign of the spectacular designs promoted on pages like this one -- but then again, the old Auckland City Council reckoned it would take until 2016 to do that design. This one may have been the more quickly designed one.

"Te Wero

220 Quay St, Auckland central

This is a purpose built island which offers a prime location for events space. It is one of the best vantage points for on-water events. It features the heritage lifting bridge and a number of carvings that were installed as part of the America's Cup challenge. Includes marquee anchors installed for large events. Access is via Eastern Viaduct car park. There is no seating or toilets. This is a venue to come and soak up the Viaduct Harbour atmosphere." From old Council site.  

"Te Wero" is the challenge visitors in a Maori welcome ceremony receive when visiting a marae.

On to the main bridge linking Te Wero with Wynyard Quarter.

Brief stop to photograph a beautiful craft. (Update: she's the 1925 gaff ketch Breum. More info here.)

When visiting the Wynyard Quarter and using what is termed the Wynyard Crossing -- if the siren sounds and the lights flash, beedle off it quick smart. Because ... it does this:

Some today were a bit slow getting off it. Luckily for them, they didn't end up clinging for dear life to each end.

Wynyard Quarter is still a work-in-progress, despite being opened last weekend. Which surprised me. The blurb I'd received and seen basically implied "It's all done! Yay us!!" Well, no, not quite. This bloke's still hard at work on finishing touches, for one.

As is this bloke. These are seats, he told me, which slide around on rails and wheels, and the ends are hinged so they fold up.

And the information kiosk ... well, I think that's all done, but by the looks of things, it doesn't appear to be. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit of a cranky grouch through dodgy sleep patterns just lately, but -- is this really the impression we want to give overseas visitors? A kiosk made out of shipping containers stacked up?

This is certainly the first ATM I've seen sticking out of the side of a shipping container.

I was looking for the public artworks which promotion papers on the development said were around. This seems to be one of them: "Silt Line", by Rachel Shearer and Hillary Taylor. The patterns represent, according to the "Public Art in the Wynyard Quarter" card I picked up from beside the shipping containers "graphic representations of the clusters of sounds making up the sound installation The Flooded Mirror, high and low frequencies and revealing the cycles of the tide."

Not terribly awed, I moved on. I couldn't locate "The Flooded Mirror" until an hour later when I left to go back to the city. Some weird noises nearby was probably that. The frequencies made me want to move away from them, so it was good I was doing just that.

This is "Sounds of the Sea", by a duo of artists named Company from Finland/Korea.

These repeat along the North Wharf.

I think these are part of it, but -- I'm not sure.

This is Michio Ihara's "Wind Tree". It has had a chequered past. It was installed in Queen Elizabeth Square at the bottom of Queen Street in 1977, removed in 2002, put in storage, rumoured to be destined for Western Springs, and has now ended up here.

But beyond Wind Tree further east is this -- a playground full of cool stuff.

Only thing is -- as a parent said today, while watching her kids: there's no fence, and the playground is set in a place surrounded by roads which moving traffic still uses. Not really the safest place to put a kiddies' playground, I'd have thought.

Long rocks lying on artificial turf. I have no idea why.

But hey -- at least there's trams.

I paid my $10 adult ticket (which allows you to go around the 15 minute small loop all day if you wanted to. Which I didn't) and did try part of the route. But -- it was depressing. After the delights of Christchurch's tram loop in 2007, this was just sad. Next to no views, except of light industrial buildings, parked cars, some boats in a small harbour, a bus depot, then back down to start all over again. The poor old heritage trams look terribly out of place, here.

The tram barn used by the service, though, has been given a fitting livery. The photo on the rear facing Pakenham Street is from Graham Stewart.

This is where the line stretches into the distance.

I deliberately took this shot to show just what passengers look at while passing on through -- the back end of parked cars on part of the route. On the other side, building construction sites, and carparks.

Is it going to get better before the Council decide to can the whole thing? I don't know.

There are some pretty bits to the new development, though.

Heading back citywards, I thought I'd give the experience 5/10 for a good attempt, anyway. Hopefully, if it's still going in the summer, things will be fixed up, there'll actually be heritage plaques that are visible, and perhaps the trams will have fitted in more.

After all, we're the City of Sails and of the Sea. Hopefully, more of that will have come through by then.

The Animals of Zion

This is a bit of a departure from the usual heritage theme around here -- but I've always said that history isn't just something behind us and in the past, it is also in the here and now.

Putting together The Zoo War back just before Timespanner kicked off in 2008 led me to explore not just how menageries became zoos here in New Zealand, but also the fate (in many cases sad and avoidable) of the animals.

I've been watching with rising concern the recent spate of news articles and telly commentaries about the Zion Wildlife Gardens up near Whangarei. Now, the family issues, the who-did-what-and-where debates are something else entirely. There are courts and conferences between the folks concerned to try sorting all that out. But, whenever there is pressure from financial quarters when it comes to animal parks and zoos -- the welfare of the animals tends to be what's on the line. Every time.

Visit Save the Big Cats at Zion Wildlife Gardens on Facebook. This is a campaign to try to convince the local territorial authorities, and even ministers in government, to recognise the park and its animals as a valuable and intrinsic asset for the Northland region, and the wider nation.

A Matter of Convenience

We might be about to lose another part of our past and the landscape of memory, if Auckland Council sell off the small toilets and rooms at 50A Rosebank Road.

Avondale considered a public toilet was both a necessity and a convenience by 1916. The only facility of its kind at that time seems to have been connected with the Post Office of the time, the old Avondale Hotel building on the corner of Wingate Street and Great North Road. The Road Board of the time made an offer to take it over, but the Postmaster refused.

Things continued as they were until the inauguration of a tram service in early 1932. With the tram stopping just at the beginning of the shopping area on upper Rosebank Road, it gradually became obvious that people getting on and getting off at the tram stop had a need for relief. There was no place at the tram terminus for the travelling public to “spend a penny” apart from private residences. H J Johnstone, Secretary of the Avondale Development Association, one of our early residents and ratepayers advocacy groups, wrote to the Town Clerk on 8 September 1932, drawing Auckland City Council’s attention to the need for a public toilet at the shopping centre. The Association followed this up with another meeting that November, and another letter, suggesting a site – at the corner of Rosebank and Great North Roads, alongside Fearon’s butcher shop. This may have been the site which is, today, Catering Kitchen café. But, nothing further came of this for nearly five years.

The Avondale branch of the Labour Party made an appeal to Auckland City Council on 1 April 1937 that employment opportunities be created in Avondale. An example of a works project to be undertaken in the district, they suggested, was the provision of a public convenience, somewhere in the shopping centre. The City Engineer visited Avondale in February 1938, and reported that two likely sites could be either  Crayford Street at Great North Road, or Racecourse Parade. On 28 June 1938 Council received a petition organised by Mr C H Speakman of Orchard Street, from 169 residents of Avondale, including that W. J. Tait, local land agent, businessman, and President of the newly-formed Avondale Businessmen’s Association. The petition pleaded for a “convenience for Ladies and Gentlemen of the Avondale district and travelling public.” However, there were still no funds available for any work to take place, and the proposal was deferred until the 1939/1940 estimates round.

In November 1939 a combined Avondale-Blockhouse Bay community lobby committee was formed, consisting of representatives from the Avondale branch of the Plunket Society, the Avondale Businessmen’s Association, Blockhouse Bay Improvement Society, Avondale South Women’s Club, Avondale Women’s Institute, Avondale Labour Party and Avondale Returned Servicemen’s Association. They met on November 28, and wrote to Council the next day to consider the proposal for a combined public convenience and Plunket restrooms. At a deputation meeting with Council on 14 December, the committee’s secretary advised that Tait was prepared to offer land on Rosebank Road in return for work on the toilet/Plunket rooms being completed within a year. This was a small part of land which Tait owned as a result of a mortgagee sale in July 1938. Tait originally offered the small site with a 16 foot frontage, but Council by-laws required 20 feet minimum, so Tait increased the area offered to 20 feet x 100 feet. In May 1940, the Avondale Plunket Committee began fundraising for a donation of £50 to Council toward the cost of their rooms.

At the time, the Plunket committee in Avondale, founded in 1922, had seen an increase in work in the district by 200%, a sign of Avondale’s increasing residential development. They were paying rent for use of the ante rooms in the Oddfellows Hall (St Georges Road, just along from St Ninians church, now demolished) for the nurse’s use, receiving mothers and babies on Monday and Friday afternoons. “These ante rooms,” according to M Everton on 20 June 1940, writing as the Auckland committee’s secretary, “cannot be locked, leading as they do, from the street entrance to the Hall where dances are held during the week. Therefore, at times they are left in a disorderly state, and on several occasions Nurse’s cupboard has been broken into, and belongings taken.”

Council approved the construction of two conveniences at a cost of £700 in June 1940, and plans were drawn up by the City Engineer by September of that year. The western wall was to have been a party wall shared by the toilets and a new building for Tait: the new building was not constructed. Foundations were to be steel reinforced concrete, with construction of brick and concrete, with wooden floors and tile roof. The land was transferred to Auckland City Council in December 1940, and the building was completed towards the end of 1941 as per the agreement with Tait, officially opened in 28 February 1942. The Avondale branch of Plunket was based at the offices at the rear of the toilet block from 1942 until 1981, when the service moved to one of two villas at 99 Rosebank Road (present day site of Avondale Community Centre). The establishment of the Rosebank Road toilets emphasised, in an understated way, that the boom years for Avondale’s shopping centre (1940 to 1965) had arrived.

The interior has been altered many times since construction, with the exterior less modified. Improvements were made to the Plunket rooms in 1947, along with the small semi-circular brick wall at the front to separate the entrances to the toilets from that to the Plunket rooms. The entrance to the Plunket rooms was completely separated from the toilets in the early 1950s. Land at the back of the block was transferred in 1947 to J Steele Limited for £30 for that company’s factory building, and more land was transferred in 1955 for the bus turnaround area when trams were replaced by trolley buses. In 1981 the Council Traffic Department moved into the former Plunket offices. In the 1990s, this was the base for the Keep Avondale Ward Beautiful anti-graffiti campaign.

In February 2011, a fire in the storage rooms at the rear of the toilets badly damaged the rooms. The toilets themselves were closed. Auckland Council is now considering selling the land completely, and installing replacement toilets across the road.

It’s a pity, really, that the building can’t be altered and put to another use, even if no longer a toilet. Quite frankly, in all the time I’ve had the need to use its conveniences, the interior (of the ladies, of course) had a dingy appearance to it. It was old and small, and no amount of flashing up with bits of paint and tile could hide the fact that it was tired, and out-of-step. As for the offices at the back, even during the heyday of Plunket’s tenure there, one story my mother told me as to why I wasn’t a Plunket baby was because of the drafty cold corridor there. She objected, after one examination, to dressing me in the chill – and never went back. But it’s a pity something else can’t be done with it. A member of the community, and former Avondale Community Board member, Paul Davie, suggested to me this week in conversation that one reuse could possibly be as an art space, combining the toilet area with the back rooms.

The wall facing the remains of the bus turnaround area, its existing old mural the subject of a previous post, could also become a great canvas for another of Avondale’s already much-loved heritage mural works. I have some suggestions for subjects on that wall, if ever it was saved: a tram coming down Rosebank Road, a trolley bus waiting on the turnaround, the old Methodist Church, now long gone across the road, and because Plunket in Avondale had such a long association with the small building – perhaps a nurse and a child, or something along those lines. The old toilet block on Rosebank Road, for all its faults, is part of our history, something the community got together and campaigned to obtain for our part of Auckland. A pity it may not be part of our future.

Just … a pity.

Sources:

Council Archive files, especially those copied by Mike Butler and lodged at Avondale Library.

Heart of the Whau, 2003.

Update, 23 December: Positive news from the Whau Local Board, which has decided to look at ways to keep the building. More here.

Update, 21 September 2015: After just over four years, the Local Board had approved a lease for the refurbished office space that the old block has now become to the Pacific Events & Entertainment Trust, calling it the Avondale Community Hub.

Chinese NZ Oral History Foundation blog

Another new heritage blog, this one from the Chinese New Zealand Oral History Foundation (which I proudly support). It's still in the process of set-up, but worth taking a look.