GOING!

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 51, 7 September 1928, Page 11

GOING!

"OLD IDENTITIES" DOOMED

CHANGING WELLINGTON

Nothing serves to stop tho growth of the newer and lustier Wellington. Old landmarks are ruthlessly removed, familiar facades and facias disappear before the pick and hammer of the professional demolisher. AValls are battered down, and old wooden shops and houses are hero to-day and gone tomorrow. The new and invincible Wellington stalks triumphantly over the ruins and the dust of structures once tho pride of the citizens, the mastorpicces of architects, the crowning work of its master builders. Pneumatic drillers and riveters, batteries of concrete mixers, relentless hammering and sawing add to the increasing din of tho streets with their horribly rumbling tramcars and tho usoful but digusting retchings of tho klaxons. A new Wellington is being built over the old and making plenty of fuss and noise in thoprocess. The renaissance necessarily involves sacrifice, and there is presently to bo offered up in the cause of progress the Old Identities, whoso wooden hoads form keystones to window arches at the Albert Hotel, originally "Plimmer's." Does not his portrait in wood < attest the fact1? Yes; the days of the Albert, as it is known to-day, are numbered. Place will .bo given to a projected imposing "Hotel Majestic." An eight-story building in permanent material will replace the wooden hotel so familiar to hundreds of thousands who pass it day by day; so well known (or used to be) to visiting theatricals in search of and finding really comfortable quarters. This new building is to contain over 200 rooms for guests and provision will be made for ten shops on tho front with shop accommodation on a mezzanine floor. The bedrooms, it is proposed, will have the last word in comfort and convenience and light, and almost all will be outside rooms. Lounges and foyers will be handsomely furnished, and a dining hall to seat over 350 people is provided for. But what will become of the old identities? There they arc to-day as they have been these many years. Portraits of worthy citizens in wood, over 20 of them. Bewhiskered and moustached for the most part—a great variety indeed shown in tho way they wore hair on the face in those days, long, long before it was considered almost indecent for men to go about clean shaven, as it is to-day. Whiskers that encircled the face and neck like ruffs, dundrearies well curled and anointed, waxed moustaches, and those that recalled the walrus, big busy beards that came down to' tho fifth waistcoat button, precisely trimmed mutton_ chop whiskers. Yes, these old identities were proud of their faces in those days, and believed with Mahomet that man's glory was in his board. But their wooden, cream-tinted presentments must go. But where1? Where too shall be the last resting place of that imposing half-length heroic sized wooden figure of Edward Gibbon Wakefield? To-day it crowns tho pediment of the Albert on its Willis street front. To-morrow, when the Majestic rears its lofty flag-staffed heights, where shall the wooden image of Edward Gibbon Wakefield be found? Theso portraits sculptured in wood of "Promotors of the W. and M. Railway," as tho facia affirms, where shall they repose when the Albert Hotel shall have gone and the proud Majestic shall occupy its place?