Greys Ave: What central Auckland's oldest thoroughfare tells us about our city

One of central Auckland’s oldest thoroughfares tells a bigger story about our city.

In Auckland we found a one-bedroom flat in what was once an old clothing factory owned by Ross and Glendining Ltd, a Dunedin firm. A friend’s mother used to work here as a machinist when she was a teenager. It was converted into expensive apartments in the 1990s and renamed ‘Park Lane’; the duplexes on the roof have terraces overlooking Myers Park. An old school friend, whose parents live downstairs, calls it an old people’s home because so many of the residents are elderly.

It’s on Greys Avenue, one of central Auckland’s oldest roads — known as Grey Street until 1927. It’s steep and straight, climbing from behind the Town Hall to Pitt Street and the Karangahape Road ridge. In the past it reached all the way to Queen Street and was a busy route for horse-drawn carts.

The London plane trees that line it were planted in 1871, part of the city’s first beautification project. Streets like Jervois Road in Herne Bay were stripped of many trees by some subsequent ruthless and short-sighted regime hell bent on wider roads. But the Victorian plane trees here still flourish, a skeletal arch in the winter, a lush canopy of green in the summer.

We wanted to live here on Greys Avenue because the flat has a four-metre stud and a long stretch of wall in its main room, ideal for our battalions of books. The location means we save on bus fares: Queen Street is just down the hill, K Road just up. I can climb through Albert Park to my job at the university. We can walk to concerts at the Town Hall, events at the Aotea Centre and the Civic, plays at Q and the Basement Theatre, Unity Books, movies, record shops, Burger Fuel.

For me there’s something else as well, something about inhabiting part of the city’s past. Sometimes the city’s past is more clear in my mind than its muddled present. I still think of the cafe at Smith and Caughey’s as the Copper Kettle. I still think of Beresford Square as the place where the Farmers free bus stopped and turned. Because I lived away for so long, I missed many of the gradual changes of Auckland.

Read the full story by Paula Morris on Metro Mag