Taking it to the street

By MICHELE HEWITSON

High on the ridge at 429 Queen St, the Baptist Tabernacle looms over the mayor.

This temple with its Greek-inspired pillars, says John Banks - never daunted, least of all by large buildings - represents what has been "an almost spiritual renaissance" of the street that should be the heart of Auckland.

The Tab, as it is known, is about to undergo an $8 million restoration of the 1885 building which will take in the adjacent buildings on the corner of Queen St and Karangahape Rd also owned by the Tabernacle Trust. God will be linked to Mammon (presupposing planning permission) via a glass atrium.

The mayor stands in the middle of the top of the street - let's forget that little appendage called Upper Queen St because who ever goes there? - to have his picture taken with the street stretching behind him, all 1544 metres of it.

Far beyond, at the very bottom of the street, Britomart is emerging out of the dust of freshly cleaned Oamaru stone: the $5 million restoration of the Old Post Office.

Once a contentious election issue for a pair of mayors, Banks now promises "a world-class transport interchange which will link greater Auckland to the CBD".

Britomart, says the mayor, will bring Aucklanders to Queen St.

But the first challenge will be giving them a street worthy of getting off a bus to see.

Aucklanders have become used to seeing the mayor on the street. He walks it every day. Today he's walking it with me, and stopping to talk to locals and visitors.

Outside the St James theatre, the mayor tsk tsks at the black pools of chewed gum marking the pavement.

"When I was a very young member of Parliament I would have advocated that the unemployed get down here and do it [scrape it up]. I've since been reliably advised that it's not politically correct to say these things when you're a statesman."

It is quite possibly not very politically correct, either, to joke that his wife, Amanda, comes into the Town Hall every morning to scrub the stairs.

"Well, you know we're very community minded, and she has a great sense of civic duty. And two for the price of one: it's good value."

This is what the mayor likes about Queen St: the cabbage trees and pink canna lily plantings give what he calls a "southwest Pacific flavour".

The Town Hall. The MLC building. Smith and Caughey and Chinatown, although he says it needs a face lift. The rock band at The Tab on Sundays. The Tab has the best rock band in the country, says the mayor, never given to hyperbole.

He is very excited about the proposed tabernacle refurbishment. "It would also," he whispers as we wander around to peer at the faded grandeur, "make an incredible nightclub."

Outside the Queen's Head Tavern he stops and tsks again at a patch of fresh graffiti. "By the end of the day that will be gone," says the statesman. Don't even think about tagging on Queen St these days.

The mayor has made his own mark: he is Mr Zero Tolerance. The city is spending large amounts of money on sophisticated surveillance electronics.

"It's labour intensive. It costs money. But we're proving we're saving money by stopping the vandals."

Since John Banks became mayor in October 2001 he has spent quite a lot of money and quite a lot of outraged breath on changing the face and spirit of Queen St. Banksie's ideal street is law-abiding, free of drag-racing hoons, free of graffiti, and a 'no booze on the street' zone.

Come on to his street, he warns, and "in a short passage of time you will not be able to enter CBD Auckland without being watched". A young Banks used to ride his Triumph Bonneville up and down this street on a Friday night. Not speeding, one hopes. "Oh, no. Masquerading."

He is nostalgic about a street where the ghosts of knocked-down buildings still rankle. Outside the Winz building at 3/450 Queen St, he winces at what he calls a hideous development from the 1950s. This is the sort of thing that keeps Prince Charles from visiting Auckland, he reckons.

"Once I get rid of it all I'm going to invite him for a visit."

Outside the building is an abandoned armchair. "There's the throne. So we've already got that."

He calls a cheery hello to the homeless people outside the Methodist mission. He says he spends quite a bit of money buying them coffee. They ignore him, but he doesn't seem to mind.

Further on down the street he approaches a man carrying a mattress over his shoulder. The man wants to talk about Banks' adopted Russian children. Banks is very flattered that this man would know this about him.

Banks likes old things and odd things and brand spanking new technology for his street.

Is this the way we want our street: a camera recording every move?

"I think it's a very good thing for those who respect personal security." He shrugs and says "I'd prefer to live in a city where it wasn't needed, but it is."

Nick Prasad, who works in the street, is all for it. Already he says, you can sense the change on late-night Fridays. "Not having alcohol at night-time makes it easier to deal with people."

A chef at Strada calls out to Banks: "You're the best mayor we've ever had." Why? "The street is safe and clean."

The tourists on the street seem to like it - unless they're being polite. Two young Danish women backpackers wandering a quiet street on Auckland's anniversary day say they're not bothered that the street was pretty much closed the day before, on Sunday: that happens in Denmark too. "It's nice," says Christian Hansen, "laid-back."

Their only gripe is that there is no supermarket. The proliferation of Starmarts doesn't impress: too expensive, they say. Since Deka, with its basement superette closed down in 2001, Queen St has been left to the Starmarts. There is the little gourmet grocery in Wyndham Lane, the Family Barrow in the Downtown Centre, but nowhere on the street.

Reg Matthews from Essex likes the lack of crowds on the street. Just one little thing, he says: except for the paucity of people, he wasn't sure whether he was in Tokyo or Queen St: "It seems more geared for the Asian market."

A couple of locals on their lunch hour, Theresa Fabricius and Varsha Mistry, have some complaints. Fabricius says the street stinks. On a Monday morning she says it smells of burned tires and rubbish. Neither would come to Queen St on a Friday night.

Despite Banksie's clean-ups, the perception remains that after dark the street is the home of the hoons. The police say that Queen St has become a safer place, anecdotally at least: on New Year's Eve, for the first time in many years, the police reported no serious assaults. This might well have to do with the fact that more than 100 people were taken off the street and spent their evening in custody for flouting liquor laws.

The greatest foe of the street is the shopping centre.

In 1971 Queen St, the Golden Mile, reigned supreme. But by 1978 the council was failing to attract the retail dollar. In the face of encroaching shopping centres, the council decided to go head to head: In 1979 the Wellesley and Victoria St section of Queen St was closed off for a trial complex.

Seventy per cent of affected retailers were hostile, writes Graham W. A. Bush in Advance in Order, a history of the Auckland City Council.

"In June 1981 the mall was with almost no publicity deleted from the Council's list of objectives."

But Michael Barnett, chief executive of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, is not so sure that the idea has had its day.

"If Queen St is going to compete with the malls, it has to ask itself what it's putting forward as a point of difference." He doesn't believe it has one. And it's not accessible. And it has nothing to offer to convince him to stay on in the city after working hours.

"I come into central Auckland the hours that retailers are open [and those] are the hours I'm working. [Then] I go home."

Enter Queen St's knight on shining scooter: Heart of the City chief executive Alex Swney, whose job is to sell the CBD as a destination.

This is what Swney, often seen trundling the street on his trademark Vespa, likes about Queen St: Queens Arcade, because it houses Marbecks Records. "What Roger Marbeck (or his father) don't know about the music landscape is just not worth knowing. Theirs is a business that just would not work to the mall formula."

The Civic, the Town Hall and the Aotea Centre. "Here we have the new and the old delivering a huge range of international and local acts. I say to those who complain that we are not an international city that you need to come back to Queen St before you die of suburban neurosis."

He does have a gripe. "One thing that does bug me about Queen St is the road itself. We are a pedestrian destination but this balance is not recognised while this environment is dominated by a four lane road." Swney's dream is of a "wide, two-lane road and even wider footpaths. This promenade would be bordered along its entire length by nikau palms and other tall Pacifica-style vegetation. By doing this we would reinforce the image of Auckland as a boutique, harbour-edged, Pacific city."

In the beginning there was mud. A local issued this warning in the late 1880s:

"Look only upon Queen-street, that regal paragon of miry ways; - extend a glance up to the bogs of its minor appendage, West Queen-street; - consider the almost impracticable mud banks of Shortland-street; and without diverging into that filthiest, yet busiest of haunts of men, high-street, proceed onwards to Princes street, even there this noble thoroughfare will soon be worn into ruts and ruin," warned a local in the late 1880s.

This was not news. Queen St was developed in 1858, its progress literally swamped by the periodic flooding of the Waihorotiu stream. Eventually culverted, and renamed Ligar Canal, the stream was diverted by way of a brick tunnel which ran down the street.

More than 100,000 people, workers and students, flood into the city every day. A good percentage of those tread the noble thoroughfare. The 2001 census showed a CBD residential population of 8307, and 1395 of those residents live above the street.

Traverse the street in 2003 and beware the loose pavers that send a woosh of dirty water straight up your trouser leg.

"Third World," says the mayor.

He estimates it will cost $50 million dollars to bring the street's curbs, channels and footpaths up to scratch.

"We will fix it but it's going to take time and it does cost a lot of money." The council collects about $18.5 million in rates payments from the street annually.

Halfway down Queen St the music is pumping out from the Sounds music store. A sign of life on a miserable rainy Auckland summer's day. Now, what do we think of this, Mr Mayor?

"Is that music? No," he says. "I wasn't aware that was music. But if it was music, that would be all right."

You can imagine that the mayor might rather like the idea of his daily strolls down Queen St to be accompanied by soaring arias.

But the desires of the pedestrians are rather more pedestrian: let's get those pavers fixed.

Counting on Auckland

* Auckland has 35 per cent of the country's businesses, excluding farms, and employs more than half the country's workforce (511,000 full-time equivalents), excluding farmers.

* Auckland's sea and air ports handle a fifth of the country's exports, by value, and two-thirds of the country's imports. By volume, Tauranga is by far the biggest export port thanks to the log trade.

Herald feature: Mighty Auckland