KEY POINTS:
There is a whopping great hole in my neighbourhood and it has been there for ages now. I am not thrilled about it. No, not at all.
I live in Grey Lynn, in the inner-reaches of Auckland. The nearest main road to my house is Williamson Ave and if I drive/walk/cycle/jog up to Ponsonby Rd, I have to go past this whopping great hole. Okay, there's not so much of the cycling and, especially, of the jogging, but the point remains that the hole remains and it has remained inactive for a long time and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
The hole even has a name. It is called Soho Square - although Soho Canyon would be more accurate. The hole even has its own website where it is described less as a "gigantic scar on the cityscape" and more as a "landmark development creating a vibrant environment". Well, the bit about it being a mark on the land is, I suppose, sort of accurate, although the environment it has created is less vibrant and more desolate in my book.
Why the hole is called Soho Square and what Soho has to do with Ponsonby I'm not entirely sure. There is a Soho Square in London. I know this because I've sat there and listened to the Kirsty MacColl song of the same name. I also know the London Soho is so-called because it used to be farmland where the British aristocracy hunted small defenceless animals whilst shouting the traditional hunting call of "soho!" The closest thing to fox hunting I can think of happening in Ponsonby, New Zealand, is when young men go from bar to bar on Friday night looking for attractive women.
There is also, of course, a SoHo in New York - but this is an abbreviation of South of Houston St. Maybe the hole in Ponsonby is actually SOHO, in that it stands for Site Of Hideous Orifice. This makes more sense to me than any other pretentious affectation of the word Soho - especially when it is applied to a hole.
According to the hole's website, something called "staged completion" will start happening from November 2008. I am not sure what stage will actually be completed by November but given the current level of activity in and around the hole, I can only presume this stage involves the hole filling up with water from all the sodding rain we've been having.
Thus, if all goes according to plan, the creation of this vast, stagnant body of water should mesh nicely with the arrival of summer and mosquito breeding season.
There used to be something where the hole is now. Okay, it was a yeast factory which, in itself, wasn't very Ponsonby and was rather whiffy at times. But it was at least something producing something; a place where people went to work. The only person I've seen working round the hole lately was the day I walked past and there was a solitary bloke, way down at the bottom with a yard broom sweeping the concrete. It was a bizarre and forlorn image.
Look, I'm sure the people who dug the hole were full of the best wills and intentions when they dug it; to create their "vibrant environment" full of cafes and fashion outlets and cinemas and apartments and the more than 1250 underground carparks - which necessitated the digging of such a monstrous hole. I'm sure the truckloads of money that equated with the truckloads of earth they took away was only a secondary concern.
But the fact remains there is a hole in my neighbourhood and no one seems to be doing very much about it. So I have had an idea and formed a plan. Sure, my plan involves a few hundred laws being broken, but at least it's a plan and it involves all these wealthy businessmen who have run various finance companies and so forth into the ground - people who have left thousands of New Zealanders in the lurch while they hide behind bankruptcy and family trust laws and carry on business as usual. What we do, for starters, is get a bunch of angry people together and we go round and we demolish these businessmen's flash houses and their empty office buildings and their other flash holiday houses.
Then we get a horde of trucks and we take the rubble from all these houses, etc and we use it to fill in the hole. Then we whack on a bit of topsoil and turn it into a park. We can even call it Soho Park if you want.
Yeah, I'd like to drive/walk/cycle/jog past Soho Park. It'd be much nicer than Soho Hole.
