CITY'S CULTURAL NEEDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 185, 7 August 1935, Page 6

CITY'S CULTURAL NEEDS.

It is regrettable that yesterday's conference to compose the differences over the question of using the old Grammar School site in Symonds Street as an area for a Fine Arts block ended only in deadlock. The Grammar Schools Board as trustee asks for a price or for guarantees, and says the site could be turned over for commercial purposes with great advantage to the Board. But would not this supposed advantage be largely illusory? The Board has ideas about endowments and its duties as a trustee for the needs of secondpry education in Auckland which are out of date. Endowment income no longer governs the salaries it pays, the size of the staffs, or the accommodation in its schools. All educational endowment money in the Dominion is now pooled. If the Grammar Schools Board as trustee were able to double its income the benefit would go into the central fund. But the Board is by no means as free as it once was to decide what use should be made of its endowment properties. Yesterday the Minister reminded it that if it sought to convert the Symonds Street site into cash, similar proposals would be put forward all over the country. Exactly; here is the clash of central and local control. The Government is finally responsible for all educational needs, and when a new site or more accommodation is required for grammar school purposes in Auckland the Government will have to provide it.

That being so, the Grammar Schools Board is in a position to view its trusteeship in a wider sense. It has a duty to the community, and should realise that the community would not tolerate the commercial exploitation of the Symonds Street area. The site, now virtually idle, is ideal for the purposes of a Fine Arts centre. It is twenty years since the building was vacated as a secondary school, and never again will such a school be needed in the locality. In the interests of Auckland's future the area between Albert Park and the lower part of Grafton Gully should be developed along town-planning lines as a cultural centre, and the proposal to build on the old Grammar School site a block to house a School of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery and the Old Colonists' Museum should appeal to all public bodies. It was suggested yesterday that on the opposite side of Symonds Street the City Council had sites on which it could build. The time will come when the whole of the frontage from Wellesley Street to the University Science block will have to be dealt with, and several public uses for it could be suggested. The Grammar Schools Board should visualise the present scheme as only one step, though a most important one, in providing for the cultural growth of the city. The sacrifice it is being asked to make now may be small compared with what the City Council will have to consider. In the interests of education and progress the Board should reconsider its attitude; otherwise the City Council may be compelled to choose some inferior site.