Over the winter of 2023, as a lucky recipient of the part of the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship, I was given the use of a studio apartment above the George Fraser Gallery in the eastern end of Albert Park opposite the University of Auckland. It was the first time I’d spent any time in the city for close to 20 years. The traffic and the noise immediately drive me bonkers and I longed for my quiet life on the outskirts of Mangawhai where the greatest noise pollution I face is my various neighbours’ profound love of mowing their expansive lifestyle block lawns.
I arrived at the residence in autumn when the days were still balmy and the old gold light hadn’t yet given way to winter with its near constant rain. The russet leaves of the ivy that clads the nearby Northern Club and the George Fraser Building were beginning to drop. Soon just the skeleton of the ivy would remain. I wasn’t the only one living in Albert Park though: there are enclaves of homeless people roosting under the balconies of the other grand Edwardian buildings on Princes Street. They are as territorial as stray cats about these choice spots on the edges of the park and arguments frequently erupt. They arrive as the day fades into night, swinging themselves up onto the balconies once the daylight inhabitants of the buildings have locked up and left. Come day break they vanish into the city. When I lived at the Sargeson residence I didn’t go out come night fall. I didn’t feel safe. I was a stranger in a strange land.
But I was very familiar with Albert Park and its city surrounds. In the latter half of the 80s when I was in my late-teens, and new to Auckland, this was my neighbourhood.
A few minutes walk down the hill from the George Fraser building was the Melba, a wonderful restaurant and bar in an art deco building on the corner of Courthouse Lane and Chancery Street. The building was originally constructed for the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and the ground floor where the Melba was had once been a bank. The safe, concreted irrevocably into the foundations of the building, was used as a wine cellar. It wasn’t quite my first job, but it was the first job that felt really right. Like it was my home and the staff and owners were my new grown-up Auckland family.
It’s gone now of course, the restaurant, the building, the whole block in fact, razed in the late-80s when the continuous process of the city being torn down by wrecking ball happy philistines hell bent on modernising really began in earnest. Back then the city skyline was a mass of cranes. Charming Victorian and Edwardian buildings like His Majesty’s Theatre and Arcade which came down in spite of ongoing protests about its proposed demolition over the 1987/88 Christmas break when the inner city was deserted, because that’s how they rolled back then.
The glass-roofed arcade that the theatre was located at the back of was positively Dickensian and I have fond memories of a glorious vintage shop packed with beautiful clothes and a ballet shop where I used to buy my ballet shoes. One of those summer nights just before Christmas and the arrival of the demolition crew in the dead of night, Marcus Lush and I joined the fray of protesters including the Topp Twins and author Maurice Shadbolt. Interestingly Auckland’s current Mayor, Wayne Brown, owned the engineering consultancy that was tasked by the building’s owners Pacer Kerridge Corporation with securing the demolition order from the Auckland Council. In an interview for Stuff in December 2022, Brown recounted, with some glee, his role in destroying the much loved Auckland landmark, concluding that “it was a dreadful old building really.” So obviously not a fan of historic Auckland which gives me tremendous fear for the ultimate fate of the St James Theatre in spite of its current stay of execution.
Another lovely building that came down around the same time was the red brick Auckland Electric Power Board building on the corner of Hobson Street and Bradnor Lane. Sea water was pumped up from the harbour, into the building and fed through the generating coils which heated it, then was gravity fed to the Tepid Baths in Fanshawe Street. When my flatmate Scott and I discovered the Electric Power Board building on our regular Sunday walks around the ghost town that was the inner city, the roof and most of the walls were gone, allowing us to gaze into the water-filled pit below street level. It was a really very beautiful building that could have been repurposed in a number of ways. But this was a city hellbent on destroying its history one building at a time.
The western end of Hobson Street, now a multilaned motorway on ramp dominated by the hulking TVNZ building, was once inhabited on the city side by a long row of rundown and hopelessly impractical Victorian shop-and-above terrace houses with gardens, outhouses and sometimes small stables out the back. I remember being taken by a boyfriend to explore them shortly before the demolition crews moved in and sitting on a pile of bricks in the sun eating small sweet musky grapes from a vine that grew rampant over a collapsing red brick wall that encircled the garden.
There used to be lots of this sort of housing in the city back then before shoe box apartments became the norm. In the 80s and well into the 90s buildings all over the central city had had their empty spaces converted into living spaces by resourceful individuals. Managed by people in corporate offices and owned by corporate landlords and developers who were happy to turn a blind eye in exchange for some regular cash as bathrooms, kitchens and loft bedrooms were installed with zero regard or understanding of the rules and regulations about such things. Most were fairly rudimentary, largely unlined, uninsulated and blessed with soaring ceilings. They were impossible to heat, but some of the spaces were pretty amazing too. Buildings that are now long gone. Reduced to rubble and dust.
I wasn’t immune to the lure of warehouse living. Facilities and heat! Who needs them? Well me these days but I was tougher back then and caught up in the romance of warehouse living which was 100 per cent inspired by the film and to a lesser extent the novel, Diva which was published in 1979 and translated into English on the back of the relative success of the film in 1983. The film which I discovered before the novel, was a French art house confection adapted and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, from the second of six novellas about a bohemian artist/musician Serge Gorodish and his under-age Vietnamese muse Alba. Written by Daniel Odier who published his fiction under the pseudonym Delacorta, they are sadly no longer in print. But back in the 80s I bought all six from Unity Books and devoured them. The film which is ravishingly beautiful both in how it looks and sounds, Paris and opera are a winning combination, is available on DVD from Alice in Videoland and well worth a watch. Beineix would go on to make the much more popular Betty Blue, another of those films that would become an important touchstone in the young lives of myself and my peers. Everybody had a Betty Blue poster up on the wall somewhere in their crummy flat.
Two minutes walk away from the George Fraser building, across Albert Park, past the statue of Queen Wikitoria and Sir George Grey, is the western end of Kitchener Street. The Auckland Art Gallery dominates what is a very short block with Albert Park on one side, and a handful of modest, predominantly Edwardian buildings on the city side. Arguably the least impressive of these buildings, just two stories, street level and a floor above, is 18/20 Kitchener Street. I don’t know how it’s survived 40 years of relentless central city demolition given that it’s sited on prime inner-city real estate and not working all that hard for its keep, but it has. Number 20, which is the upstairs, is now three apartments having undergone a major renovation, but when I lived there in the mid-80s it was just two huge rooms with soaring triple height white brick walls that terminated in an unlined corrugated iron pitched roof, rows of large windows on the north and south facing sides and polished wooden floors. A bathroom was built into the centre of one of the rooms and a curved white photographic backdrop into the far wall of the other.
It’s a building with a lot of contemporary history. The photograph (above) dates from before my time when Miranda Davidson-Joel had her boutique Pussyfooting downstairs in what had once been the offices of Cooper’s Garage. By the time I came along the boutique had been replaced by a studio pottery and craft gallery. Phillip Peacock’s Parachute Photography did time in the building upstairs hence the photographic site and the pink silk parachute that was draped from the ceiling. The parachute had all but rotted away and when it was cut down the years of dust that had accumulated in its folds came down with it. I sneezed for days. Megan Douglas who had returned from Japan and set up her shop Obscure Desire, I think on Albert Street, had also lived there and was perhaps responsible for the bathroom and the huge cutting table I inherited when I signed the lease for the princely sum of $200 per week towards the end of 1986 when the summer was far enough along to flood both the rooms with all day sun.
It had been a toss-up between Kitchener Street and a one-bedroom Courtville apartment on the fourth floor at the back of the building which from memory was $160 per week. I can’t remember why I decided to take Kitchener Street. Perhaps the thought of footing a $160 per week rent bill by myself spooked me, or maybe the romance of warehouse living was the winner on the day. It might have even been the thought of living by myself that scared me because what 18 year-old did that? This was back in the days when I kidded myself that I liked other people enough to live with them. As much as I loved Kitchener Street in spite of its myriad failings, I’ve always regretted not taking the Courtville apartment. It was, and I suspect still is, bijou perfection even though in spite of being north facing it gets bugger all sun these days because it’s been mostly built out.
As glorious as Kitchener Street was in the warmer months, my flatmates always abandoned me. A combination of my intolerance for other people and plummeting winter temperatures. Who can blame them? No insulation or heating and that bare iron roof many feet above, it wasn’t just sodding cold, it was bloody freezing. And it came with a crazy woman. So I spent the two winters I lived there alone, perhaps going a little bit mad, but definitely enjoying the solitude. I’ve always been happiest living in my own head. Security at Number 20 was less than ideal. The fire escape window didn’t have a latch which was handy when I had forgotten my keys as it was easy enough to get someone, flatmate or work colleague, to give me a boost up to the metal fire escape ladder so I could clamber up and through the window, and yet even when I did stretches living alone there I never felt unsafe and really I probably should have. Albert Park was home then, as it is now, to the homeless. They were younger back then. Glue huffing street kids in the main. Now they’re meth smoking adults with perhaps even less to lose. Fortunately by this stage the Parnell Panther had been caught, tried, convicted and jailed. Bearing in mind just how much time I spent beetling around Parnell at odd hours by myself due to waitressing commitments and the host of friends I had working at the Verandah Bar and Grill, I really could have had a lucky escape in that respect because I walked everywhere. It’s a funny thing looking back and wondering just how many times you cheated either death or at least a catastrophic life event. There by the grace of God go I. I can’t remember why I abandoned Kitchener Street and left Auckland in the end. I think I’d just had enough.
I would return to Auckland briefly a few years later to start university studies again. Arriving on the doorstep, so to speak, of my friend Liz Tan’s warehouse in Civic House next door to the Civic Theatre. It was only a short stay, less than a year, but it was a ton of fun. Liz was the station manager of BFM by then. A short 21-year old Chinese Malay/Kiwi with flowing dreadlocks and a kick ass attitude. The smart employees at the station feared her. No wonder she got the job. These days she lives in Los Angeles and works as a First AD on film and television productions all over the world. But even back then we knew she was going places.
We lived on the third floor of Civic House, with Tanfield Potter the ceramic specialists on the ground floor and Gopal’s, the Hare Krishna restaurant on the first and fourth floor where they respectively had their restaurant and kitchen. The smell of asafoetida from their cooking was the olfactory back drop to our lives. I swear it had permeated into the concrete of the building.
The most curious thing about Civic House was the house that was built on the top of its flat roof, not another floor, but a cottage that wouldn’t have looked out of place in suburbia, surrounded by a concrete lawn. Perhaps it was there originally for a caretaker but by the early-90s when we lived in the building it was a rental inhabited by Anthony who worked at DKD Cafe next door and his girlfriend Victoria who was one of the glamorous Zambesi shop managers and resident muse. In my novel-in-progress, Ordinary People Like Us, Annie, one of the main characters, the one who thinks about dying most days, climbs the stairs of Civic House to the roof, sits on the parapet that runs around the perimeter on the Queen Street side overlooking the St James, West End and Odeon theatres and contemplates the possibility of pushing off and plummeting to the street below.
Civic House and DKD fell victim to the massive rebuild of Aotea Square in the late-90s when all but the facade of Civic House and the back of the Civic Theatre where there was once a row of shops like Blue Beat and the entrance to DKD was completely gutted and replaced with the gigantic white elephant that is the Sky City Cinema Multiplex. The floors of Civic House are completely gone, replaced by stairs immediately behind the windows in which I once danced with sparklers for the edification of the people across the road waiting for buses. I got a standing ovation for that. The multiplex, once Queen Street’s great white hope was mostly abandoned well before Covid, though those times undoubtably nailed the coffin irrevocably shut on its viability. These days it’s a disastrous architectural fever dream of empty retail spaces and stairways to nowhere waiting for the wrecker’s ball to come in and put it out of its misery.
There’s a film clip that appears periodically on Facebook of DKD that starts off outside at the bottom of the stairs up to the cafe. The camera briefly rests on the back of Civic House and the row of windows on the third floor where Liz and I lived, along which a make shift kitchen and bench had been built. I can almost see myself standing there, making a cup of tea almost forty years ago and my heart breaks a little bit even though I know that change is inevitable. Nothing stays the same.
But by this stage I was starting to get sick. Living at Civic House had been fun apart from the stomach aches and regularly throwing up. I gave up drinking which I’d never been good at anyway which helped. Once I went home to the Far North my gut settled down for a while. Doctors told me I was a neurotic anorexic and washed their hands of me until my bowel perforated for the first time and had a really good go at killing me. So Crohn’s Disease not anorexia. Being right is a small consolation. Crohn’s would try to kill me again in 2016 but that’s another story and I’m not that easy to kill.
I avoided having anything to do with the homeless when I took up my Grimshaw Sargeson residency in Albert Park. Once upon a time I probably would have talked to them or at the very least acknowledged their presence. But these days I’m a querulous and frightened old woman, not a bullet proof teenager scared of nothing. The city has changed, but so have I. Somewhere along the line I learned to be careful. Risk adverse. You have to in order to survive.
Kelly Ana Morey (Ngati Kuri, Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri) is guest editor of ReadingRoom all this week, and her opening essay belongs to the theme of the three essays she has commissioned: home. Tomorrow’s portrait is of Timaru
