Look to your right at the narrow, steep-sided green gully lined with an avenue of tall, rough-barked Phoenix palm trees and a white marble statue resting near the base of a long concrete staircase.
It looks peaceful, doesn’t it? A slice of greenery carved right out of the city grid. But if you were standing here in the late nineteenth century, the view would have been very different, and the smell......well, let’s just say it wouldn’t have been pleasant.
This gully, now known as Myers Park, was once the lower end of the Queen Street Valley. By the 1890s, it wasn't a park at all, but a cramped collection of working-class cottages that had deteriorated into a slum. It had a lurid reputation as a "den of iniquity," infamous for illicit gambling, prostitution, and opium dens.
The city fathers didn't just want a park here; they wanted what they called "social hygiene." That is a polite, historical way of saying they wanted to clear out the poor residents and bulldoze the "undesirables" along with their ramshackle housing.
In nineteen thirteen, a man named Arthur Myers stepped in. He was a brewer and politician who donated nine thousand pounds to the city to purchase this land-a massive fortune equivalent to well over one and a half million dollars today. But the real visionary was arguably his sister-in-law, Martha Washington Shainwald. She was an American visiting from San Francisco, and she was appalled that Auckland children had nowhere safe to play. She brought the American "playground movement" philosophy here, convincing Myers that this shouldn't just be a place for polite strolling, but a dedicated space for child welfare.
That philosophy is built right into the architecture. You might see the white kindergarten building in the park. Opened in nineteen sixteen, it was designed with circular walls and no sharp edges to protect the children. However, that innocence was short-lived. Just two years later, during the nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic, that cheerful building was commandeered as a desperate overflow hospital for the dying. There are persistent local rumors that the park grounds were used as an open-air mortuary when the city couldn't keep up with the bodies.
That grim history has lingered. Despite being designed as a children's paradise, the park has a well-known "dark repute." It has been the site of modern tragedies, including a fatal attack in twenty thirteen on a man who had simply stopped there to eat his dinner. Locals often speak of the park being haunted, particularly the steep staircase leading up to St Kevins Arcade. People have reported hearing disembodied screams or feeling unseen hands pushing them on the stairs.
On a lighter note, look for the marble statue of Moses near the stairs. He looks quite dignified, but his arrival here was a bit of a comedy. In nineteen seventy-one, a department store tried to gift the city replicas of both Michelangelo’s Moses and his famous David. The council happily took Moses, but they rejected David. Apparently, the city council decided a nude statue was a bit too scandalous for the public, so poor David was sold off, leaving Moses here all alone.
Beneath the grass you are looking at, the ancient Waihorotiu stream still flows in pipes. It usually stays hidden, but during the massive floods of early twenty twenty-three, the stream "remembered" its old path, bursting from the drains and briefly turning this valley back into a raging river.
This valley certainly has a way of holding onto its history, whether it is the water beneath the ground or the stories in the shadows. When you feel ready to move on, we can make our way toward the Town Hall.
