Inspired by Los Angeles Metro’s blog series Then & Now, here is a look at the intersection of Balmoral Rd and Dominion Rd. The historic image is sourced from the Auckland Council Heritage Image collection, and identifies the following businesses:
…showing the premises of Mrs Porter, Dressmaker and Fancy Goods (right);from left in Balmoral Road to Dominion Road: Balmoral Soda Fountain and Confectionery; Powells Prams; Boot Repairer (Charles Leonard); Staceys Cake Specials; Capitol Theatre on Dominion Road.
What’s changed? There is considerable erosion in this area from road widening. As many as ten buildings were removed from three of the four corners leaving swirling slip lanes and leftover green space. Today the area consists of restaurants and a few local services such as a dairy and dry cleaner. The Capitol Theatre was re-opened in 2009.
The tram lines have been removed, but the urban structure of this historic neighbourhood supports some of the highest levels of PT patronage in the city. On weekdays there are more people in buses moving down this street than there are cars.
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Lots of lovely wide streets in Auckland perfectly suited to the return of trams. Bring it on!
But without removing car capacity please. Balancing transport investment is fine, but you have to respect the fact that most Aucklanders do drive after all.
So all we need to do to fit in trams and bus lanes is bowl a few houses. Works for the motorway folks.
/sarcasm off
Cool old photo. I love before and after pictures.
Look at the obvious PT prioritisation they had back then – no traffic lights and Trams with automatic right of way.
I see no evidence of any PT prioritisation in the 2013 photo.
Funny, you guys see the missing trams, I see the missing buildings.
I just see an unfriendly place that I would travel through.
Kent I see the many missing buildings too, but this is Auckland, and such things as “missing buildings” are “normal” and so don’t usually elicit a comment.
This intersection now is reduced to a place to go through (as quickly as possible) on the way from somewhere to somewhere else, not a place you’d want to live near or shop at.
There is a very low-hanging PT prioritisation project in there that could happen overnight.
Great to see what a busway down the middle of the road could work like.
exactly …
Or a tramway down the middle of the road?
Eventually
The tram lines are still there (you can see the broken surface above the rails for the right hand track). Most tram tracks in NZ were left in place when they closed, as it was far easier to just seal over than rip out. Just this week, tracks were uncovered in Gisborne too, where the entire network is still in place, being probably the best preserved network in the country, in terms of how much of it remains.
That would make a great doco.
You may be right Geoff, but my recollection is that usually (if not always) the steel tracks were removed but the concrete foundations left in situ. If you’ve ever had to install a road crossing in some of these areas you’d know this! Drilling doesn’t work in these circumstances unfortunately due to the plethora of obstructions, often unrecorded. I’m speaking of Auckland here, not Gisborne.
Unfortunately I am old enough to remember the Dominion Road trams. Not that this was our patch. However but we used the Victoria Avenue (single track with passing lanes) or the Meadowbank trams on a consistantly regular basis. My fare to town was twopence ha’penny and my mothers fare was 5d.
About the only improvements I see in 2013 are the absence of electric poles and the presence of trees.
The trees are only in the park (always there) and the awkward triangles of land left over after demolishing buildings to build slip lanes. half a block along there are no trees.
I wouldn’t call the latter an improvement by any means. So kind of the road wideners to leave little ‘parklets’ behind so people could sit and enjoy the intersection.
What’s the deal with the Sir George Grey collection? Are photos added to this? Or is there some other collection of contemporary photos?
I love these old photos, but I’d hate for future generations to not know what Auckland looked like before Britomart was built, or before the Central Rail Link completely changed the central city….
There are very few from the 70’s onwards, which is a real shame. Would be great to see how city has changed since that time for some of us newbies.
Check resources like Wikimedia Commons, Flickr or similar. Don’t worry – the period from 80s onwards is well-documented for the future. The period from the 90s is very well documented, and from the 2000s onwards, there’s enormous amounts of photos (even if counting only the ones currently publicly accessible) to a degree that problems of choice and finding the right thing are more the problem than anything else.
With nick rs point i couldnt agree more. Why on earth they think a little park next to an intersection is useful is beyond me. The onehunga group proposal for the east~west link had walking lanes along it. That made me chuckle a bit. Going for a walk along an 8 lane highway is not really most peoples idea of a fun time.
Also. The thing that stands out to me in the photo is the tram poles and cables dont intrude as much as i thought they might. I guess because of the regular spacing of them. One continuous flow as opposed to the second photo where the traffic lights and street lights with their irregular spacing and heights make it seem more cluttered
The old photo of Dominion Road (ID:7-A10950) is one of around 700,000 photographic items in the Sir George Grey Special Collections at the Auckland Central Library in Lorne Street. About 10% have been digitised and can be viewed on-line at
http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/heritageimages/index.htm
along with 133,000 images from the Auckland Weekly News (1898-1943). Or you can come into the Reading Room and look through our file prints.
You might also want to check out the South Auckland photographs database, Footprints at –
http://manukau.infospecs.co.nz/footprints/home.htm
and the North and West Auckland database, Local History On-Line:
http://www.localhistoryonline.org.nz/cgi-bin/PUI
You may like to explore the Dominion Road Stories web exhibition and/or come into Auckland Libraries to listen to the oral history collection – there is a lot of content that relates to both Then and Now, the road and transport and more general stories of living and loving the iconic Dominion Road.
http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/virt-exhib/DominionRoadStories/index.htm
Sue Berman – Oral Historian – Auckland Libraries (x42 7825)