NEW POST OFFICE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 102, 1 May 1943, Page 4

NEW POST OFFICE

MANNERS STREET SITE

WALDORF PROPERTY BOUGHT The Post and Telegraph Department has purchased the property known as the Waldorf Building, Manners Street. | The Postmaster-General (Mr. Webb) said today that the Department intends to utilise the site, when circumstances permit, for the erection of an up-to-date'building with a post office on the ground floor and offices above. In the meantime the Allied Services Club and other tenants will be allowed to continue in occupation. The former owner of the property was Mr. Will Appleton. It was taken under the Public Works Act, and it ii> understood that the price was about £40.000 The area is approximately one-quarter of an acre, with a frontage of 63ft to Manners Street and a depth of 219 ft. The frontage of the Waldorf was set back to a new alignment some years ago, and Manners Street is to be further widened by setting back .ie building line on the southern side. ONCE ON WATERFRONT. The site was waterfront land in the early years of Wellington, with the water practically as its boundary, and that part of the pre-reclamation waterfront was for a long time the very centre of the young port's business, with the old Customs House, jetties and piers, main warehouses and stores, ship chandleries, and so on. It was the first banking centre also. The Union Bank of Australia, first in Wellington, opened very briefly at Britannia, shifted to a tin shed at Thorndon, and, still within the first year, opened the doors of its own building at the foot of Lombard Street—Lombard, no doubt, because it was the way from Manners Street to the new financial centre. With the northward movement of shipping, warehouse, port, and office business, these activities shifted over the years to the present city centre, but it is interesting that one of the originals, the Union Bank, not long ago placed its Manners Street branch not far from its 1840 office. A succession of buildings used the site at one time and another. In the earlier years they concerned themselves mainly with ships and shipping, but changed over to merchandising and retail business as Manners Street grew in importance as the throat through which city traffic ran east to west. For twenty years Henry Fielder's furniture emporium was Manners Street's Big Shop, with a dust-pan over the main door as the sign; inside was everything, from dust-pans up. Radfords were there for some* years. At another time it was a crockery shop in a big way, as Wellington shops went then. But in later years the restaurant tradition held the site, as the Rialto and the Ritz, and then, after a break when Shillings and MacDufTs had departmental stores there, the Waldorf, which last year became, for the duration, the Allied Services Club. This lease will not be disturbed, and the club will continue to cater for our own and visiting service men and women. TRANSITION COMING. Rates and land tax records of this site are history in themselves. Always they have climbed quickly, faster in late than in early years. In 1925, when Mr. Appleton purchased the property, which was then largely rebuilt and set back to the line of a wider Manners Street, the city rates were £304 and the land tax £33; last year's rates were £808 and the land tax £345, a rocketing due largely to a revaluation about 1930 when a property nearby changed hands at £600 a foot, probably the highest for any Manners Street property deal. That was a special case, but city rate and tax overheads based on unimproved values are severe in relation to the older style two- and threestoreyed buildings between Willis and Manners Streets. So severe are they as to compel, after the war, replacement of old by multi-storeyed buildings of higher rental return. The new branch Post Office, seven or eight storeys high, will be the first, setting a standard for the rest of the street. The change in buildings cannot be made till after the war, but a clear decision about street widening may come before then, while property prices are, generally speaking, static, even retrogressive, because of such high fixed outgoings to be met from rentals of outmoded buildings standing on land of highest unimproved value rating.