Strand Arcade, Auckland, New Zealand

The Strand Arcade in Auckland was a late Victorian addition to the city centre; the year 1900 stands under the name above the entrance on Queen Street. The walkway is fairly narrow for an arcade of this height so its four storeys tower up above as you enter, and there are bridges joining the two sides of the arcade on each floor.

The phone shop near the Queen Street end has kindly offered one of its main windows for the display of historical photographs of the arcade through the decades. The most striking image is possibly from 1909 when a massive blaze left the arcade as a skeleton, meaning little of the structure is ‘original’.

A photo from the 1970s shows the arcade still busy and with a wide range of interesting shops: umbrellas, cookies, tea and coffee; there is even a bronze-looking fountain in the foreground. A lot of the units now are devoted to beauty, with several hair salons, a nail bar and a cosmetics store; there are also a few cafes and eateries, most notably a Japanese café; and an attractive gallery, with a quality boutique next door. A number of the units are empty, though it looks as if the council is encouraging pop-ups, so there is potential for new life yet.

It was quiet on the day of my visit, but it was a wet Sunday and quite early, so some of the outlets were just opening their doors for the day. But there was no sign of crowds like on the day in the late 1980s when Bon Jovi were actually in the arcade record shop, and word clearly got around town as the arcade, and that shop in particular was mobbed by fans (nice photo of that day in the historical window also).

My pick of the arcade’s past

When the Strand Arcade opened in September 1900, local observers heralded it as adding a degree of splendour to a part of Queen Street that had become ‘dingy’ or an ‘eyesore.’ The Auckland Observer a few weeks after it opened suggested it was a place ‘where ladies love to linger and the sterner sex to spend an odd half-hour now and then, free from the dust and roar of the open street.’

At the time of the massive blaze which gutted the whole arcade in August 1909 the tenants included: a café, a tea room, tailors for both women and men, a book shop, piano shop, milliner, hairdresser, optician, watchmaker. The newspapers reported the next day: ‘This morning, nothing but bare walls remain.” A man called Thomas McPherson was hero of the hour, pulling one man onto a roof next door away from the flames after climbing up the walls of the arcade using narrow foot and hand holds, and then falling with a collapsing wall underneath him before being rescued by the fire brigade.

There was tragedy in the arcade in May 1922 when a young woman and a toddler fell to the tiled floor from the 4^th floor, both dying instantly. A witness said the child dropped first, followed by the woman, and since none of the shopkeepers in the arcade had ever seen the woman it was assumed that the visit to the top floor of the arcade had been made on purpose to carry out the suicide and take the child with her. At the inquest into the deaths a suicide note was found, declaring she was not of unsound mind, and leaving all her estate to the local hospital.

Sources for all the above stories from the New Zealand National Library’s Papers Past website.