Store’s closing recalls Great Christchurch Fire

Press, 25 February 1978, Page 16

Store’s closing recalls Great Christchurch Fire

By

JOHN WILSON

When it closes in the middle of the year, the D.I.C. store in Christchurch will be within a decade of celebrating 100 years of business in the city and just a year short of celebrating its seventieth year of occupation of a building which was, when it opened in 1909, the last word in elegance and efficiency of shopping in Edwardian Christchurch.

The Drapery and General Importing Company of New Zealand Ltd, founded in Dunedin

in 1884 by Mr B. Hallenstein, opened its branch in Christchurch in 1885 by purchasing the business of Mr E. C. Brown, who had his store in Cashel House. Mr Brown stayed on as manager for the new owners of his store for some years, presiding over a steady growth in the store’s business.

By 1900 the whole of the company’s site between Cashel Street and Lichfield Street was covered by three-story brick buildings. A list of the store's departments in that year includes some which are familiar to today's shoppers and some which have passed with changing fashions and tastes.

Drapery was then, as now, the store’s leading feature. Among the departments for which today’s shoppers would look in vain were those for coloured dress and black dress; a separate department for laces and frills; another for tailormade costumes, skirts and sunshades; and one for corsets, which were still in vogue in 1900.

The people of Christchurch were also apparently taking advantage of the country’s prosperity at the turn of the century to improve their homes, for there was a considerable emphasis on furniture, a very large piano and organ and sheet music department, and departments selling other goods which are now the province of specialist stores.

But this particular establishment, described as so flourishing in 1900, eight years later fell victim to the Great Christchurch Fire of February 6, 1908.

Announcing the imminent opening of the present D.I.C. building on the same site, on which work had begun on May 18, 1908, the “Weekly Press” declared that “from the ashes of the conflagration which ravaged the business heart of the city a year ago there has risen a wonderfully spacious and

thoroughly up to date emporium.”

The building had been designed by the Christchurch architectural firm of England Bros. ‘‘Wherever possible,” the ‘‘Weekly Press” noted, ‘‘artistic touches have been applied to charm the eye and to beautify that which might easily otherwise have been permitted to stand in bold, utilitarian unloveliness.’’ On the Cashel Street frontage “most pleasing architectural effects” had been secured “by the

artistic alternating of white and red stone” (this effect has been obliterated by later painting of the building).

The shop’s internal appointments were also impressive. Shoppers entered the building through doors of handsomely figured walnut and bevelled plate glass, ■ into vestibules paved with marble. They did their shopping over solid, polished walnut counters and ascended to the upper floors up stiarcases with carved rimu balustrades and j a r r a h treads. The showrooms were “replete with all the latest fittings to ensure the effective display of the daintier articles dear to the feminine heart.”

The highest artistic taste had been lavished on the appointments of the tea-rooms, described as a spacious apartment, beautifully lighted by three immense oriel windows, the walls of which were papered in “a charming tint of golden russet.” At each end of the room were open fireplaces with richly carved mantlepieces.

The newly opened D.I.C of 1909 also boasted the latest in mechanical contrivances. In the building were 7584 feet of drawn brass tubing, part of a pneumatic Lamson tube system which fed into a central cash desk in the second-floor counting house. The building was lit with gas burners and lamps fed through 9109 feet of gas piping and emitting the light of 101, 983 candles. The gas lamps were lit not by the then customary pilot lights, but by electric sparks, a system which called for 9300 feet of electric wiring. With the lesson of the great fire still fresh, the building was equipped with Grim m e 11 ’ s patent, sprinklers, which could draw on an 8000-gailon reservoir on the roof.

Outside, the D.I.C. building, in spite of the injudicious use of paint and the loss of the original iron verandah

with a shaped steel ceiling, is still one of the more handsome of the city’s older commercial buildings, and it is to be hoped that the future occupiers of the site will be able to use the

premises without harming this monument to Edwardian opulence and elegance. Inside, however, there are now few traces of Edwardian elegance. The iron pillars, with their elaborate capitals, still support the ceilings of each floor of the shop, some interesting coloured lead-light windows have survived in some of the outside walls, and one stiarway at least still has what appear to be the original balustrades. But of solid walnut counters and of lavishly appointed tea-rooms, there is no trace — all were victims of successive modernisations as the store kept up with changing fashions and changing business practices.