This is an image from Mark Bishop. Here are the previous posts: Queen and Wellesley, Newton Rd, Kingsland
These images were developed by merging together various historic black and white photographs (all from the “Sir George Grey Special Collection” – Auckland Library) with contemporary colour photographs taken at the same location.
The black and white photographs were taken between the years 1900 to 1940, and cover a number of areas of the city and the outlying suburbs. The colour photographs were all taken in early 2015.
The intention of these images is to use photography to help show how much has changed – or not changed – over almost one hundred years by focusing on locations that are familiar to Aucklanders.
It is interesting to think that the people, horses and trams seen in these images passed by around a century ago where we walk and drive today.
Mount Eden Village. View looking north up Mount Eden Road, Mount Eden Village. Black and white photograph (1910-23) from “Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries 35-R243.”
In some ways this is also a glimpse into the future with Auckland Transport looking at installing Light Rail down Mt Eden Rd and other Isthmus streets.
Processing...
I think that’s the best one so far. Any way a third dimension of “the future” could be incorporated too? Like a newer tram? 🙂 Look how empty Mt Eden Road is!
Although I haven’t seen it specifically mentioned in the government land being released for housing, I believe Auckland University has said they no longer require their Epsom site previously used for teaching training – about 500m to the right of this picture.
Hopefully the building of houses on this land on a prime central Auckland site, plus the housing planned for Three Kings quarry further south will mean we don’t have to wait 22 years for LRT on Mount Eden Road.
Auckland Uni want to divest both the Tamaki and Epsom land and consolidate in the city, the Newmarket site was key to allowing them to do that along with the currently constructed new Science building and planned new Engineering buildings.
It’s quite a thought that Auckland, not too many years on from now, might have not only theCRL, Airport-rail and North Shore rail, but a thriving Isthmus LRT network as well. It would have at last caught up with the 21st century. People would have to pinch themselves to remember the bad old days of the 1990’s when a moribund rail system nearly foundered. When trams were only found in MOTAT. When the very name Auckland was a byword for ‘urban stuff-up’.
Young people will grow up, never having known pre-CRL Auckland, or the multiple-cancellations and obstructions that blocked it for so many decades. Unless taught the truth, they will assume an Auckland full of vitality and livability, striding confidently across the world stage, is just the way it has always been.
And where will be the obstructionists and the naysayers then? Where will be the Keys, the Joyces, the Brownlees, the Bridges, the Quaxes and the Brewers? [Probably bragging that it was all due to them!]
Dreams keep us alive!