Welcome to Auckland’s original ‘Municipal Destructor’. Everyone, like me, know it as Victoria Park Market – a super popular open air market through the 80's to 2000's – a great place to buy your crystals and tie-dies etc! I've always known that it was originally the city rubbish dump – when the city was waaaay smaller). There is more to the story, of course. It was originally created in reaction to a bubonic plague scare in Sydney. For sanitary reasons it was built to burn Auckland’s rubbish and waste while using the heat generated to provide electricity to power the city. Sounds pretty clever eh, and I guess we were plague free. However, we must have been breathing some seriously toxic smoke fumes! That 38 metre tall chimney must have helped a little but don't forget all the horse manure and night carts, they were definitely smellier times. The municipal destructor is now a gentrified place that's home to restaurants and businesses, like the superb Milenta restau...
I've been intrigued by this building on Wyndham Street for years. Still looking dignified - I suspect it has always looked this way - despite various neighbours coming and going over the years, adult shops, bars, massage parlours and now various Asian restaurants. The brass plaque and strange old-style wooden screens inside the windows announce 'Thorne Thorne White Clark-Walker Barristers' and enough books and papers clutter the upstairs windows to confirm a thoroughly 'analogue' business.
Passing recently I noticed the plaques and screens have been removed and the building for lease - time to sketch it before it gets made over into a noodle shop or massage parlour!
From what I can find online the building appears to have been under almost continual* use as a legal chambers since the 1870's with the departing business being founded in the early 1900's by William Thorne, I presume the founder of what is now Thorne Thorne White Clark-Walker Barristers. There wouldn't be that many Auckland businesses that have survived that long, let alone occupied the same building for so long! Is this some sort of record?
* The building was for a short time in the 1880's, home of the Evening Star newspaper and housed homing pigeons in the roof. The pigeons brought news from the Thames goldfields and international news from ships arriving in Russell.
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