KEY POINTS:
Mayors come and go in Auckland City, but one thing never changes: heritage buildings keep tumbling down.
On death row since April 2004 has been the old Fitzroy Hotel, Wakefield St, built in 1855 and Auckland's oldest surviving hotel building. In October 2003, permission was sought to knock the place over and replace it with a 50m-high tower of apartments, many of the notorious shoe-box size.
Six months later, the city gave the developers the green light, regardless of attempts by indefatigable heritage campaigner Allan Matson to have the historic hotel listed as a category A heritage building.
He had more success with the Historic Places Trust, which in September registered the long-forgotten relic as category 1. In November the council came into line, dropping its earlier assessment that the building was a lowly 47-point dump and giving it a heritage rating of 72 instead, just three points short of the 75 needed for the top category A status.
Even so, the new category B ranking was an embarrassing admission of error.
Thankfully the developers, Lily Zhong's Winning Investments, had a change of plans, deciding instead to incorporate the old hotel within the new tower. But feet dragged and the time limit ran out on the two-year consents.
Eventually, last April, a five-year extension of the consents was applied for.
Last Wednesday, the hearing into this application was held before independent hearings commissioner Alan Dormer. His decision is reserved, but the evidence presented shows what lip service the city authorities continue to display towards the city's heritage.
Alongside is an artist's impression of the proposal. Developers and city officials argue that plunging three great supporting piers through the roof of the historic pub to support the tower above will have but a "minor" impact and that therefore, the consents should be extended as requested, without seeking public input.
The developers were seeking a variation of the earlier consents to allow the new project to go ahead without further fuss.
The argument is that because the new proposal doesn't bowl the old building completely as was the original plan, we should all be decorating the city with bunting. Hurrah, the pub is to be saved.
It's the same flawed reasoning mocked in Bill Hammond's haunting paintings based around stuffed native birds.
They hark back to the massacre of rare native fauna by collectors like Walter Buller, who had the warped idea that the best way of preserving the huia and other unique birds for future generations was by stuffing them.
This might have passed as heritage preservation in the mid-19th century, but surely not in 2008. Except in Auckland of course, where bureaucrats and politicians and developers still look upon the skeletal remains of the Jean Batten Building as the acceptable face of conservational practice.
At least we have a gallant few trying to shame the establishment into adopting a more civilised approach.
Mr Matson lined up respected heritage architect Jeremy Salmond to thunder that "the effects of the proposal on heritage values" are "significantly adverse and inconsistent with the objectives of the district plan". He also retained leading architect Andrew Mitchell who says the existing building could be retained unmolested and a tower block of comparable floor space to the one already planned, built on the site behind the pub.
If an unpaid enthusiast can come up with a win-win solution such as this, why can't the city officials, with their endless supply of costly consultants, do likewise?
An added disgrace is that 60 per cent of the accommodation in the proposed new tower is in the form of 16sq m studios disguised as 32sq m "twin-key units".
Each apartment opens into a tiny lobby, off which are two units, each with a bathroom and bed-sitting room with built-in kitchen. These fly in the face of the anti-shoebox prohibitions being written into the district plan and mock Mayor John Banks' pledge that no more will be built on his watch. If this development goes ahead, then nothing old in this city is safe. Help.
