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Transit NZ is being urged to overcome technical obstacles and allow a landmark western gateway to central Auckland to be developed over a motorway tunnel beneath Victoria Park.
Residents and developers are joining Auckland City Council members in supporting a proposal by architect and landscape specialist Richard Reid for the 19th-century Birdcage Tavern to be given pride of place on a civic square facing a rejuvenated Victoria Park.
The council's environmental, heritage and urban form committee on Friday called for a staff report on Mr Reid's proposal, which includes a new canopied entrance to the park and a restoration of the historic, but disused, Campbell Free Kindergarten building, across Victoria St West from the Birdcage.
That would require a rethink of the entry point of the $330 million northbound tunnel Transit plans to build by 2013 beside the park's 1960s-era motorway viaduct, which it wants to keep for southbound traffic for up to 30 more years.
Mr Reid accepts that the Birdcage will probably have to be moved about 40m up Franklin Rd while the "cut-and-cover" tunnel is built, as proposed by Transit, but believes it should be returned afterwards to the site it has occupied since 1886.
The St Mary's Bay Association of nearby residents and property developer David Henderson, whose Kitchener Group intends renovating Victoria Park Market next year, have both indicated support in principle for the proposal.
Transit says that although it cannot rule anything out before completing a specimen design by the end of this year, it believes returning the tavern to its present position will be difficult because of a need to relocate a sewer line and to minimise the gradient for trucks entering the tunnel.
Mr Reid says his plan would require the tunnel's mouth to be moved just 10m south of where Transit planned to bring it.
That was coincidentally the distance it was eventually persuaded to move its SH20 motorway extension away from the northern slope of Mt Roskill to satisfy concerns of the Auckland Volcanic Cones Society, in favour of a redesigned landscape plan produced for Transit by Mr Reid.
St Mary's Bay Association chairman John Hill said the Victoria Park locality, in which the Waitemata Harbour once reached as far back as the Birdcage, was of such historical importance to Auckland that Transit had to overcome whatever technical difficulties it envisaged.
"We have a habit in this country of shrugging our shoulders and saying, 'that's gone, we'll just move on'," he said yesterday.
"But we have to support the optimal solution for Victoria Park."
Mr Henderson said the position of the tunnel's portal had to be altered to allow Mr Reid's proposal to enhance the area.
"This is an historic precinct - dinghies used to moor where the old Rob Roy [the original name for the Birdcage] was."
He believed Transit should go further and build a two-way tunnel as one project "instead of leaving that bloody awful viaduct there for another 20 years".
Auckland City Council member Linda Leighton said she hoped Transit would be more open-minded about Mr Reid's proposal than it was towards some aspects of the SH20 motorway extension, particularly its reluctance to improve the Onehunga waterfront.
