EARLY QUEEN STREET.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20842, 8 April 1931, Page 11

EARLY QUEEN STREET.

SCENES NINETY YEARS AGO. DIFFICULTIES OF PIONEERS. OLD FEATURES RECALLED. The stops that are bring taken to celebrate this month the 90th anniversary of Queen Street give fresh interest to the story of the early beginnings of the street that lias become the most important thoroughfare in the Dominion. It is appropriate that the growth of Queen Street should be linked with a movement to inspire fresh heart and cheer in the community, for the record of its growth is an epitome of the progress of the city of Auckland. Such an impressive monument, of past achievement in the face of difficulty may well bring renewed confidence and self-reliance and inspire hopes for the future.

On September 18, 1840, Auckland was chosen by Governor Hobson as the site of the capital of New Zealand, and on April 19, 1841, the first land salo in Auckland took place. The upset price was fixed at 12s 6d per perch, or £IOO an acre, but the prices realised were more than five times that figure on the average. There is extant a "Plan of the Town of Auckland in the Island of New Ulster, or Northern Island, New Zealand," made by Surveyor-General Felton Mathew in 1841. It was doubtless made for the purposes of the sale, and many of tho features it planned have passed into oblivion. Tho Queen Street Bend. Queen Street, however, following the line of the Ligar Stream as it made almost straight for Commercial Bay, is as Mathew set it out on paper, save that its bend has gone a few chains eastward from our Wellesley Street down to the intersection of Victoria Street. At this time Shortland Street marked the boundary of the foreshore. The tides rippled where tho post, office now stands, and at the corner of Shortland Street and Queen Street, where (he South British Insurance Company's building afterwards stood, was a swamp or bog. A small stream ran through it, which at high tide was backed up as far as Durham Street. Shortland Street, therefore, at once became the most popular street as is clearly indicated in some of the earliest sketches.

The principal streets were surveyed a chain iri width, bub Queen Street was made 6till wider in parts. Sir John Logan Campbell depicted the scene in those days in a few vivid words: "The capital! A few boats and canoes on the beach, a few tents and break-wind huts along the margin of the bay, and then a sea of fern stretching away as far as the eye could reach." Some of the earliest immigrants when landing had to make their way through soft mud to rough huts that had been provided for them on the shore. Although there was 110 wharf there was at the foot of Shortland Street a footbridge about a chain and a-half long, by about sft. wide, by which alone people were enabled to cross Lower Queen Street. This solitary Auckland bridge was dignified by the name of "Waterloo." Conditions In 1842. A plan of Auckland in 1842 indicated that almost all the buildings on Lower Queen Street at, that, time were on its western side. A sketch made in 1843, however, and reputed to be the work of Captain D. Rough, shows tolerably substantial buildings on either side of it. In the foreground, on the west side, at the corner of Victoria Street, is tjhe gaol, in front of which the old-fashioned wooden stocks can be plainly seen. Curiously enough, this picture gives no indication of the Ligar Canal which in the memory of Aucklanders still living ran down the western side of the street, and was in places covered over with boards, which formed the footpath. The presence of this stream was evidently one of the factors in keeping the city's earliest development to the eastward of Queen Street.

Although by 1844 Auckland had a population of nearly 3000 and was showing signs of becoming a considerable town, Queen Street had not yet won for itself a place of honour. Jn those early years High Street was much more important as a business centre, and it is stated that only after the disastrous High Street fire of 1058 did Queen Street come into its own. Hollow at Wellesley Street. It was largely a. quagmire in its infancy, and early colonists speak of its hills and dales. They recall that at the intersection of Wellesley Street there was a particularly deep hollow, and that for a long lime after the main street was levelled across it and properly formed there was a great pond on the eastern side of the embankment at the foot of Wellesley Street East. In the early fifties tho eastern side of Queen Street ended at Shortland Street. On the opposite side of Shortland Street came the waters of the harbour in a corner where the, Maoris criming in with peaches and watermelons were accustomed to draw up their canoes. Later on, as reclamation proceeded, there were shops on the eastern sidn, built in the first, Instance on piles. The western side by natural formation extended a little further into the harbour.

There were built at an early stage a number of substantial warehouses, rising as high as three sloreys. About the present, site of the New Zealand Insurance Company's head office were three tall stores built, by the firm known as " The Three Sandys"—Messrs. Alexander Black, Alexander Dingwall and Alexander Marshall. In the same locality were, Iho warehouses of Messrs. <l. A. Gilfillan and Company, Woodhouso and Buchanan, Henderson and Macfarlane and J. Salmon and Company. A Pioneer Flourmill.

Lower down there rose in the fifties the flonrrnill of Messrs. Thornton, Smith and Firth, on the site now occupied by Sineetons, Limited. Gradually the .encroachment of the city upon tho harbour advanced, generally with pile-supported buildings in the vanguard. In one instance the erection of a building too close to the bank of Ligar Canal proved calamitous to its owner. Mr. George Sibbin, a well-known auctioneer, was erecting a brick theatre on the sito of the present llis Majesty s Arcade and theatre. One day, fortunately when the workmen were absent at lunch, tho front of the building fell suddenly outward into tho street. The collapse was attributed to tho instability of the foundations 011 the soft canal-side formation. In Upper Queen Street there were the timber yard of Messrs. Monk and Morgan on the site of tho Town Hall, and the old Wesley College, now the People's Palace, high up on the hill, but the rest of tho hillside was covered with tea-tree scrub. From such humble beginnings has grown the Queen Street of to-day, for three-quarters of a century the city's chief thoroughfare, and now more firmly established than ever in its proud dominance.