A brief history of empty spaces

I have often wandered past a couple of prominent empty lots, one between Shortland and Fort Streets and the other bounded by Albert, Victoria and Elliot Streets in the CBD and wondered how it was that there could be car parks in what must be some of the more sought-after plots of land in Tāmaki. Other than the occasional night market pre-pandemic, what has been going on with these open-air car parks? 

Turns out I’m not the only one - this has crossed other’s minds too and is a popular question. A quick Google turned a heap of results, and it looks like these are the most heavily reported on carparks in the country. A colleague had similar thoughts a few years back and wrote about the Albert Street site of the Royal International Hotel. 

Image: Artist's impression of the new Royal International Hotel on the corner of Elliott Street and Victoria Street West, 1960s, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1580-24. Artist unknown.

Image: Auckland Star building, Shortland Street, 1988, Auckland War Memorial Museum PH-2015-2-GH2232-10. Photographer: Gil Hanley. 

How did we get here?

Most of the reporting blames the share market crash in October 1987. More recent transactions have been covered by Stuff and especially the New Zealand Herald. They tell an unfortunate story of development proposals coinciding with downturns in the economic cycle and, more recently, accusations of land banking. Both sites were owned by the Daeju Group in the 2000s. A Ritz Carlton Hotel and Auckland’s second tallest building is now planned for the Albert Street site and the Shortland Street site was offered for sale by CBRE late last year.

Intrigued, I decided to dig deeper into the story of these sites and asked colleagues at the library for some resources that could help me. The first thing I was shown was the collection of Cityscope maps, for the recent history of the sites. 

Cityscope

Auckland Cityscope is a useful resource and helps track the ownership and usage of land as well as historic property prices in the CBD during its publication run – the 15 years from 1985 through the end of the millennium. It was published by Chaunter Publications who were also the publishers of Property magazine at the time. 

There was also a Newmarket edition which included parts of Parnell and Newton and ran from April 1991 to July 1999. Other areas of the motu that had their own issues were the North Shore, Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin, Lower Hutt and Sydenham. 

Image: Auckland Cityscope [p. 4-5] May 1999, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 995.11 1985

Cityscope consists of maps of the city and then property information on each lot. Here are the entries for the lots I’m interested in in 1985 and again in 1999.

Fort Street carpark – Auckland Star building

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 4 p.10 Feb. 1985

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 27 p.2 May 1999

Fortunately, these two plots of land have had relatively few transactions prior to the 1980s so we can trace their occupation back to Auckland’s early days. 

The Shortland Street/Fort Street carpark was the site of the Auckland Star building – the first of which was  finished in 1884 and then replaced in 1928 before being demolished in 1989 after it was ruined by fire. 

Image: Buildings on Fort Street, Auckland Central, 1915, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W1361. Photographer Henry Winkelmann.

Before the Star was built this was the site of one of Auckland's earliest and best known hotels (the Victoria Hotel – circled in the image below) situated on the original shoreline between Shortland Crescent (as it was then called) and Fort Street. In its early days was a temporary raupo building right on the waterfront of Commercial Bay. By 1842 a more permanent structure was built and then destroyed by fire under suspicious circumstances on 15 February 1865.

Image: Auckland in 1844, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections Map 6358

The 1866 Harding and Vercoe Map has 2/3 brick story store and 2 shops at the site and a 1 story brick office on the Fort Street side of the section. However an archaeological report cites a contemporary newspaper article saying the site had been empty since the fire which contradicts this.

Image: Shortland Street carpark: Auckland Star building, Shortland Street, Auckland. Auckland Star :Negatives. Ref: 1/1-002917-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 

Elliot Street carpark - Royal International Hotel

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 12 p.2 July 1986.

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 10 p.2 1989.

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 10 p.3 1989.

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 10 p.4 May 1999

Similarly, a hotel had been at this site since the Queens Head was established there in 1863 when Henry Adams was granted a licence after being refused the previous year. The name was changed to James’ C. Q. E in 1868 and then when William Woolley took over in 1870 to the Royal Mail. It was subsequently called the Royal Hotel and then The Royal International Hotel. It was owned by Dominion Breweries (DB) from 1930 as part of Sir Henry’s Kelliher’s strategy to own the hotels where he could sell the beer the company was brewing. It was refurbished in the early 1960s and then demolished in 1989. A claim to fame is that the Beatles stayed there during their 1964 Australasian tour. 

Image: Royal Hotel, Auckland. Original photographic prints and postcards from file print collection, Box 3. Ref: PAColl-5671-26. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

The 1980s

After such long and storied tenures on these sites the 1980s bought a different story.

Cityscope shows the properties changing hands multiple times over the decade. The Elliot Street carpark site goes from being owned by DB to Brierley Cromwell and then to the Chase Corporation, while the Fort Street carpark site goes from New Zealand Newspapers to Brierley Cromwell and then to SEABIL.

Brierley Cromwell Properties had interest in both sites. DB was plundered and almost destroyed by Brierley Investments Ltd (BIL) during this period. BIL saw the Royal Hotel as one of DB’s underperforming property assets and purchased it and on sold it to developers Chase Corp as they were buying up CBD property around the country.

The March 1988 issue of Cityscope says the Royal International Hotel was demolished in 1987 and has DB and BIL having a joint shareholding in Acadia Corp and planning on building an office, retail and parking on the site.

Image: Auckland Cityscope Map 13 NO. 10 March 1988 p.2.

In September 1986 Chase took over Farmers and ‘decimated the company and… a lot of the goodwill built up over 78 years’ was lost.’ The March 1989 issue of Cityscope now has Chase Corp planning to develop the site, “perhaps as a Farmers’ department store”.

Image: Finance Minister Roger Douglas with Chase Corp Chairman Colin Reynolds at the opening of the Finance Centre Plaza (a Chase Corp development), 7 December 1987. Photo by Sheryl Campbell, copyright The Auckland Sun.

Chase were, for a time, New Zealand’s biggest company. They reshaped how the Wellington and Auckland cityscapes and skylines looked and are now owners of a one paragraph Wikipedia article. Researchers of this time period will be familiar with this discrepancy. 

News reports

Desktop research for topics pre-World War 2 will often yield enough results thanks to Paperspast - although at the platform’s 21st birthday celebrations in 2022 colleagues from the National Library did remind us that only around 5-10% of the corpus of Aotearoa newspapers is currently on there. Something to bear in mind. The Press is available in full-text up to 1995 but this is an outlier. 

And if you really want to do a deep dive into a post-1945 but pre-Y2K (when some full text online resources begin), the contemporary newspapers and magazines are the place to go, especially given the relative inaccessibility of NZ’s broadcast media archives. For example, a search on Chase Corporation in the Ngā Taonga audiovisual archive yields 140 results, only four of which are available online. 

Thankfully previous generations of librarians made indexing newspapers a priority. 

These indexes created by librarians include the New Zealand Card Index, Index Auckland and Index New Zealand (INNZ). These and other regional news indexes are aggregated in the New Zealand Index, which is paywalled but many libraries subscribe.

I would echo the advice on Newzindex website: “It is advisable to search across at least the INNZ, Newzindex and Newspaper Index collections in the New Zealand Index when looking for business, company and industry news.”

If you want to move beyond desktop research or have comprehensive information needs but don’t want to flip through every page of the newspapers or scroll every reel of microfilm thankfully, we have other resources available here at Ngā Pātaka Kōrero o Tāmaki Makaurau to help that: newspaper clippings files. These are articles clipped from the day’s newspapers and added to subject folders. These were working tools used in newsrooms, as Fairfax Media librarian, Lesley Longstaff describes their value, “journalists needed more background information on people, subjects and companies than was provided electronically.“

Auckland Libraries have complementary sets from two different organisations: the Auckland Star Clipping Files and the clippings files from the National Business Review archive.

Auckland Star Clippings 

We refer to these as the Auckland Star clippings files, but this collection is from the Fairfax Media library, and is actually includes clippings from (amongst others) the Truth, Sunday News, Sunday Star, the Dominion, the Herald and, of course, the Auckland Star. They are organised by subject and run from the 1960s through to 1997. Relevant subjects for this post were ‘Auckland: Development’ and ‘Companies: Chase Corporation’. There are 100s of entries under the Companies heading making this a rich resource for business research. 

Image: 'Auckland Development'- Folder from the Auckland Star Clippings collection.

NBR Clippings 

The second set of clippings are part of the National Business Review Archive - a treasure trove for 1980s business researchers that also contains a companies index, annual reports (a strength) and photographs. This nicely complements the Knowledge Basket’s NBR coverage in Newzindex which starts in 1985. The NBR newspaper clippings are listed by company and the list runs into the thousands.

As you’d expect with the business focus of the publication the NBR ones are much more comprehensive when it comes to the Chase Corporation amounting to 4 bulging manila folders covering the 1980s. The Auckland Star Clippings bring the story into the 1990s.

Leafing through the clippings you can see the rapid expansion of Chase Corp – investments in horse breeding, computers and private TV all in a few months.

The single paragraph Wikipedia page vs these fat packets of news clippings suggest a book to be written here. Between the newspapers, NBR and Metro magazine a huge amount was written about Chase Corp during their time. Architect and lecturer Guy Marriage looked at Chase Corp’s architectural legacy in this 2009 article and remarked how little written about Chase is available today. 

Annual Reports 

The story of these carparks, of the 1980s, of central Auckland developments and Chase Corp is a good opportunity to highlight another strength in the library’s printed collections: annual reports.

The library has a huge collection of annual reports of (mostly) Auckland-based companies. The strength is in the later part of the 20th century, but holdings do stretch back to the 19th when organised commerce and industry were taking off in the colony. These older ones are not only a great resource for business researchers but for family and social historians too. 

Image: Chase Corp annual report 1983 pp.16-17, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZMS 1634.

On June 30 1987, Chase Corp shares hit an all-time high, valuing the company at $3.6 billion, and they topped the New Zealand share market as the most valuable company in the country.

Image: Chase Corp annual report annual report 1986, pp.28-29, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZMS 1634.

You can follow the trajectory of the decade of the through the tone of Chase Corp’s annual reports. From enthusiasm and aspiration in the glossier and thicker reports through to hindsight and reflection later in the decade. There are no pictures at all in the 1989 Annual Report. 

If you’re interested in researching the city, industry and business, the latter half of the 20th century, or even you’re just interested in finding out more about plots of land in the Tāmaki Makaurau CBD, I hope these resources will be of use to you. Currently the best way to get access to the inventories of the Star Clippings and NBR Archive is to get in touch with us directly via our website. Annual Reports are available through searching the library catalogue and in the NBR Archive. 

Let’s see this time if a development can get off the ground. Or will the temporary carparks remain for another quarter century? 

Author: Andrew Henry 

Sources:

Chase Corporation / Annual reports

Clune, Frank / The saga of Shortland Street 

Dominion Breweries Ltd. silver jubilee

Houltham, Garth / Toast the ghosts : a brief history of some inner city 19th century hotels

Marriage, Guy / Chase Corp: Force or Farce? | AHA: Architectural History Aotearoa (2009) vol 6:33-50

Vercoe, John / Descriptive schedule to accompany map of the City of Auckland

! Interested in researching Tāmaki in the 80s? The Auckland Sun photograph collection could be a great help.

Read the wonderful stories and histories in the comments in the Greater Auckland blog posts on the sites: Royal Hotel and Star Site