Events

MYERS PARK

Opening Day 1916

HIDDEN TREASURE ... Myers Park is Central Auckland’s least known and most underrated asset.

The Myers Park gulley is the watershed area at the head of the Waihorotiu Stream or Queen Street River as it was usually called. In
1845 the merchant David Nathan built a house for himself on the Karangahape ridge with a view of the fledgling town of Auckland (which at that time extended no further than about Victoria Street).

Looking north from the Karangahape ridge down the Waihorotiu Stream gulley in the early 1840s

In the gulley below the house the small stream gurgled towards the harbour. At the bottom of the hill it drained into a marshy area ( the current site of Aotea Square and the Civic Theatre) and then continued its way to the harbour. Queen Street developed along the course of the stream which is why it has a couple of slight twists and turns along it’s route.

Having a stream in the middle of the road was inconvenient to say the least. In the absence of any drains or sewers it became stagnant with waste. Walkways had to constructed across it and the banks were constantly crumbling. People and sometimes even carriages tumbled in so eventually it was covered over. The Queen Street River still discharges into the harbour under the Ferry Building. It is now just a bricked in drain but it started life as a country stream.

Between the 1850s and the 1890s many houses were built on the north facing slopes below the Karangahape Road ridge. Liverpool, Vincent and Grey Sts and the upper part of Queen St were lined with hundreds of wooden Victorian houses, much like Grey Lynn still is today. The houses and shops on Queen St and Grey St backed on to the gulley; each property having its own outhouse, chicken run and rubbish heap.

Where the sections got rather steep right at the back was where all sorts of rubbish were dumped and forgotten. Through this morass of weeds, rats and rubbish ran the smelly route of the choked stream before it disappeared underground at the bottom of the hill.

The new Town Hall with a glimpse of the gulley behind.

In 1911 the splendid new Town Hall was opened on the corner of Queen and Grey Streets, just below the gulley and just near where the stream went underground. One of the major movers behind this project had been the mayor from 1905-1910, Arthur Mielzinier Myers.

Having been closely involved with the planning and construction of the Town Hall, Myers cannot have been unaware of the unhygienic state of the gulley, but it was after 1910 when he was an MP that he turned his attention to dealing with it.

Arthur Myers; Mayor of Auckland 1905-1910.

Quite apart from the threat of raw sewage seeping under the new Town Hall it was certainly a distressing sight to see the barefooted children of the area playing in the rubbish filled gulley & stream. A contemporary description called it an area of "slum shanties and rubbish tips".

In 1913 Myers donated £10,000 towards purchasing land in the area and in 1914 the current Mayor C.J. Parr initiated a programme of improvements for the City of Auckland, which amongst other things included the Grey St gulley. The City Council compulsorily purchased the back parts of properties along Queen and Grey Sts and over the subsequent years the land was cleared and levelled.

In 1916 the Nathan family gave a 20ft right of way along the eastern boundary of their St.Kevens property to serve as the entrance to Myers Park from Karangahape Road. The Nathans were possibly already contemplating moving from their house, as indeed they did around 1918. Their house, St Kevins, was demolished around 1922 and as a result of their gift part of the site was redeveloped as St Kevin's Arcade in 1924.

The newly cleared site circa 1914

In early photographs the park is a plain, almost bleak bit of land. The newly planted trees, just saplings, and the most dominant feature the large expanses of municipal asphalt paving. At the time it was constructed a great many families lived in the area. As it was intended primarily as a safe place for children to play in, one of the most dominant aspects of the park was the well equipped playground.

The idea of 'organised play' was part of the 'progressive'
educational attitudes prevalent at the turn of the 20th century. The 'Reform Park' movement was a newly developed concept in the United States where rampant urban growth was raising many concerns and resulting in the systematic provision of safe spaces for children to play and green spaces to relax in. The idea of play schools and kindergartens also developed around this time.

The Myers Kindergarten Building circa 1925

Myers followed up his initial gift with more money to build a kindergarten facility, the result of which is the splendid Myers Kindergarten Building by Chilwell & Trevithick. Myers Park, with its play ground and Kindergarten are a text book example of the 'Reform Park' movement current at the time in North America.

Named in honour of Arthur Myers, the park was opened by the Mayor C.J. Parr in January 1916. Arthur Mielzinier Myers (1868–1926) was knighted in 1924.

If Myers Park looks a bit empty at times it’s probably because it was designed to be full of children. Although the kindergarten is still situated in the park its charges don’t roam around the greater park.
Most of the children that use Myers Park today are the pupils of the Jewish School in Greys Ave. The Synagogue arrived in the 1960s just about when the last of the houses disappeared from the area.

In 1940 and 1957 state housing blocks appeared on Greys Avenue providing a large number of local residents. Hopefully the park will continue to fulfil its very important role of providing green space for inner city residents as the number of apartment blocks in the area increase.

The trees have grown and filled out a great deal over the last eighty years, screening the park from the ever increasing height of the surrounding buildings but also casting a great deal of shadow and gloom in some areas of the park. The general feel is one of neglect and unease which is totally at variance with the original intent of the park, and indeed some people regard the park with a great deal of suspicion. The lack of good lighting at night is a particular concern.

The park is long overdue to be upgraded and will hopefully receive more gifts of public art. At the moment there are two statues in the park; a marble copy of Michangelo’s Moses, donated by the Milne & Choyce Department Store in 1971, and a granite statuary group of Five Goats, presented in 2000 by the Auckland’s sister city Guangzhou.

Edward Bennett Historian

Beautiful stained glass sign in St Kevin's Arcade