KEY POINTS:
Now that Auckland City ratepayers have forked out $43.5 million to upgrade Queen St and, as a result, greatly enhanced the value of the buildings lining the Golden Mile, isn't it time the property owners came to the party as well?
The picture in yesterday's Herald of the drunkenly leaning iron veranda posts outside the historic shops beyond Mayoral Drive summed up the neglect that marks what the shopowners want us to believe is the country's premier shopping strip. The truth is, much of it looks more like the main street of a tired old provincial town, slowly dying since the state highway through town got bypassed.
The long, hot summer has wiped out old memories of Queen St's leaky verandas, but any day now, when the rains return with a vengeance, the stroll up town will once more become the 100m colander dash.
But forget the verandas for a moment. Forget even the eye-level window displays where most retailers make some sort of effort to entice the passing trade inside. It's the decay and neglect above the verandas, spotted best from the opposite footpaths, that is the most depressing. Every second building needs a good scrub. Most need a decent lick of paint and more.
It's almost unfair to single out one offender, but my lunchtime routine regularly takes me down Wyndham St to Queen St, where the eye catches the grubby old Kean's Building, rust on the roofing iron, moss rampant atop flaking paint. Alongside is a dirty blue building, on which you can still pick out in outline the indecipherable lettering of a long-gone incumbent.
Heart of the City cheerleader Alex Swney was in the paper earlier in the week claiming "Queen St is on the road back". There's not much sign of that above the ground floor.
There were plans to throw a big welcome back party for customers old and new, but that seems to have been shelved. Perhaps Heart of the City could spend the money on water-blasters and get its millionaire members out one weekend for a scrubathon instead.
What a shame they're not like that boutique building owner, lawyer Billy Boyd, whom I was reading about last weekend. He says he gets "a real kick out of buying a rundown historic building and restoring it to its former glory along with full-on modern amenities and services". Lucky CBD buildings he has rescued include Number 9 High St and 23 O'Connell St.
Mr Boyd has monthly and quarterly washing-down programmes for his buildings. Back in the 1980s, after he bought his first building, the Empire Tavern, he was spotted "hosing down the walls himself and affectionately scrubbing them".
That's the sort of pride we need from Queen St property owners. If they want the rest of us to treat their street as a destination to treasure, then they should lead by example.
It's all very well skiting about Louis Vuitton doubling its shopping area and Gucci coming to town, but one suspects this alone won't result in a huge upsurge of shoppers abandoning the malls for the CBD.
The extra width of the paving, and the fact that it doesn't wobble under foot as the previous cobbles did, is to be welcomed. And as I've said before, I'm a convert to the nikau palms look. As for the public artworks, the less said, perhaps, the better. The $250,000 glass and light folly outside the Civic Theatre was such a failure the artist demanded her name be removed from the pavement plaque. I think it should have been left as a warning to all who take money from the public purse to be careful with it.
As for the 7m-high stylised waka sternpost, designed by Fred Graham for the bottom of Swanson St, that was a good idea that hasn't worked. It's supposed to represent where waka were beached in 1840s Auckland, but to have succeeded, it needed a bit of space around it, both horizontally and vertically.
Unfortunately, stuck between two modern buildings at the end of a pokey lane, and overshadowed by a mess of verandas and signs, it just adds to the urban clutter.
But at least it's clean, which is more than can be said for much of the rest of the street.
