I rode the rails for much of Sunday. My excitement was irrepressible, as was that of the thousands of Kiwis who flocked to experience our version of an underground.

The public works included construction of three new train stations. In this post I contain myself to photographs that celebrate the excitement and first impressions of the opening day: the bustle on train platforms; the visual lines of interior spaces; and (yes) the beauty of a subway tunnel. In separate posts, I will explore architectures, both interior and exterior, as well as present the numerous art installations across all three train stations.

Beyond the sheer cuteness of the young child and the resolute insistence of his pose — I have anchored myself here — I was struck by his isolation.

I stood for some time to see if I could catch the furtive glance of the parent. The tacit acknowledgement: Yes, I see you but I, too, am lashed to place.

I surmised that parent was a nearby volunteer busker seeking contributions from pedestrians for some worthy charitable organisation.

The young lad redefined adorable and perhaps exasperated.

I do love photographing people congregated at bus stops. It is a great exercise in people-watching, especially in the age of public screen fixation. Catching people doing something other than staring at their screens is a distinct challenge.

I had been standing across the street for some time, patiently waiting for things to develop. What caught my eye initially, but notably, was the fact the only one person in the scene had a phone in hand, and in that one case it was unclear whether he was lost in scrolling when I captured my photograph. I believe he may have looked up, perhaps distracted by the purposeful speed of the delivery cyclist within the cycling lane of the side walk.

The photograph was taken as twilight enveloped Queen Street. My camera settings were such that a fixed ISO 100 setting forced an auto shutter speed of 1/30th; and the combination produced the blurred motion of the cyclist, which I quite liked. I was equally fortunate to have had comfortable spacing amongst the people presented in the foreground of the image. Mixed poses amongst those seated as well as the contrasting clumping of peoples in the background were also attractive compositional elements.

Lastly, the impress of the awning as a framing device, along with its dynamic representation of strong whites and blacks, punctuate the power of this black and white photograph.

You cannot live in an international city, like Auckland, without hitting up against a crushing reality: most major cities face a seemingly intractable affordable housing crisis. The alchemical formula is elemental. Cities create unimaginable wealth; seemingly limitless but ill-distributed wealth creates insatiable appetites for high-end consumption and investment; housing is usually a highly profitable investment; but the limited supply of a commodity creates upward pressure on its cost — case in point housing.

The histories of urban housing markets suggest repeatedly that private markets alone cannot solve an affordable housing crisis. There’s money to be made in higher-end, and not affordable, housing projects. At least within the context of New Zealand, the construction of affordable housing has required public-private partnerships, and as often as not the sole involvement of governments at national or regional levels.

Built in New Lynn, a western suburb of Auckland, Merchant Quarter was financed as a private-public partnership intended to provide an affordable housing opportunity — very low six-figure apartments in 2014 dollars — for the city’s central district. Auckland Council provided the funds for the civic infrastructural regeneration — a public car park development beneath the apartment complex and improvements to the nearby public transit centre.

I was unaware of this intriguing backstory when my eye caught sight of the Merchant Quarter apartment complex. And, unlike most photographers who gravitated to the gaiety of the complex’s front facade, I was pulled to the rear of the building.

The rear facade is austere in tone - witness the unattractive blackish-grey colouring of the building’s face. Against that flattened backdrop, the Arc Deco-inspired geometric arrangements of the window panels offer a dramatic dose of architectural panache. The elegant and precise window panel variations, along with the playful mix of window sizes, brilliantly militate against the monotony of repeated form. The off-centre placement of five metal rails that traverse the vertical length of the building face further enhances the facade’s visual vibrancy and complex geometric language.

Additionally, against the facade’s dominant vocabularies of rectilineal precision and greyscale shading, the parallelogram form and vibrant colour of the balconies are antidotes to ward off the otherwise numbing effects of uniform repetition.

Lastly, I added to my photograph the textural echoes of geometric fancy to inject an element of dynamism into the colourful but vacant canvas of the sky.

Rents are high so shops along Lorne Street are small. The economic pressures that shape scale result in a row of retail and food shops that resemble so many mouse holes along a wall of low-profile commercial buildings on either side of the street. The commercial buildings on the west side of the street are themselves dwarfed by the towering profile of office buildings along nearby Queen Street, as suggested by the background within today’s photograph.

I traversed this familiar stretch of the central city in the dimming light of late afternoon. Against a darkening streetscape, the Grill Planet BBQ Buffet looked luminous. The orange interior lights were especially inviting. The leading lines of a partially lowered ceiling lent to the compact restaurant a beguiling sense of depth. The dining venue exuded warmth and comfort.

I was bedazzled by Grill Planet’s visual charm.

It’s likely an incontestable assertion. Most people go to an art museum to study what is foregrounded - paintings and other two-dimensional works affixed to walls or three-dimensional sculptures displayed on pedestals.

Perhaps less common, as a conscious practice for a museum patron, is an intended focus on the background - the architecture of the museum or gallery. There are notable exceptions, where the architecture is foregrounded such that we are transfixed by the edifice itself. Those grand buildings dare us to be distracted by other purposes. Dedicated art patrons know those sacred places.

I feel extremely fortunate to have in my adopted retirement city an art gallery whose form - the building’s architecture - is a much the draw as are the formal art works within. I intended yesterday’s visit to the Auckland Art Gallery to be an exploration of interior spaces, having posted any number of past Substack entries on the building’s magnificent exterior, both original building and its astoundingly beautiful addition. I have noted elsewhere that the new[ish] addition, which serves as the gallery’s main entrance, is a glorious example of vernacular architecture.

Of the images I captured, today’s posted image is more prosaic than others, but I like it nonetheless. It’s not grand interior architecture nor especially expressive of this gallery’s architectural charm. Instead - no surprise here - the themes speak of tonality, geometry and perspective.

I was walking north on Queen Street on my way back to my apartment, having been to the central branch of Auckland Libraries to collect a book. It was mid-afternoon and the west side of Queen Street was bathed in the harsh light of the day. The tonal contrasts of that sharp light on the mature trees along the west side of the street were striking.

Few features, built or natural, on the walkways of a city street appear to me as powerful and inviting as that of mature trees.

I queried Claude to prepare a brief history of the urban tree movement in European cities, New Zealand having been colonised by a European nation. I reproduce below that short essay for those inclined to explore the topic.

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A Brief History of the Urban Street Tree Movement in European Cities

From military ramparts to climate-resilient canopies

The tree-lined street is so familiar a feature of the European city that it is easy to forget it was invented. Street trees did not simply grow where cities happened to be; they were deliberately planted, and the reasons for planting them changed dramatically over four centuries — from military engineering and drainage, through royal display and public health, to today’s climate adaptation. What follows is a short account of how the urban street tree became a movement.

^{Medieval beginnings: trees against the enemy}

Before the seventeenth century, European streets were largely treeless. Medieval streets were narrow, crowded and intended for pedestrians and carts, leaving no room for trees, while what greenery existed clustered in churchyards, monastery gardens and market squares. The decisive change came, unexpectedly, from warfare. As siege artillery grew more powerful in the sixteenth century, military engineers in cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam and Strasbourg began replacing vertical stone walls with massive sloping earthworks — bulwarks — that could absorb cannon fire. To stop these mounds from eroding, engineers planted rows of trees along their length.

The by-product of this military necessity was a pleasant, shaded walkway atop the ramparts, ideal for promenading in peacetime. The very word boulevard descends from the Dutch bolwerk and Italian baluardo, both meaning bulwark. The European street tree, in other words, began life as fortification.

^{The Dutch innovation: trees as infrastructure}

Amsterdam was arguably the first European city to plant trees on a large scale. From the late sixteenth century, as the city dug its famous ring of canals, it planted lindens — and later elms — along each newly cut waterway. This was not primarily decorative. The trees’ roots helped bind and strengthen the soft canal banks, and they were believed to act as natural pumps, drawing water out of the swampy subsoil on which the city was built. They also softened the stench of the canals and the squalor of the streets. By the eighteenth century, elms, which tolerated harsh urban conditions better, had largely replaced the lindens. The Dutch model established a lasting idea: that street trees were a form of civic infrastructure, not merely ornament.

^{The French grand manner: the avenue and the boulevard}

In France, street trees became instruments of display and grandeur. In 1616 Marie de’ Medici, the Italian queen of Henri IV, had the Cours-la-Reine laid out beside the Seine — a wide carriageway flanked by four parallel rows of elms, created expressly for fashionable promenading. Later in the century, under Louis XIV, the minister Colbert and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre extended this taste for formal, tree-lined avenues into and around the capital, planting grand approaches that echoed the drives of aristocratic country estates.

The culmination came in the mid-nineteenth century. Under Napoleon III, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann cut long, straight, broad boulevards through the medieval fabric of Paris, bringing light and air to overcrowded quarters. These new arteries were planted on a vast scale — Haussmann’s administration is credited with adding on the order of hundreds of thousands of trees to the city. Haussmann’s Paris became the template that cities across Europe and beyond sought to imitate, cementing the tree-lined boulevard as the signature of the modern metropolis.

^{The nineteenth century: public health and the reforming city}

Industrialisation gave street trees a new rationale. As nineteenth-century cities filled with smoke, filth and dense populations, reformers came to see trees and parks as remedies for the physical and moral ills of the industrial city. Trees were valued for shade, for filtering foul air, and for offering ordinary people access to something of nature within the crowded city. This period saw the founding of municipal parks and the beginnings of organised civic effort — societies, associations and city authorities — devoted to planting and caring for urban trees. It is here that the scattered practice of planting trees begins to resemble a movement.

^{The twentieth century: decline, science and revival}

The twentieth century tested Europe’s urban trees. Two world wars, the pressures of motor traffic, road widening and post-war reconstruction all took their toll, and diseases — most notably Dutch elm disease — devastated species that had defined cities such as Amsterdam and Paris. At the same time, the practice of caring for city trees became more professional and scientific. The term urban forestry — treating all the trees of a city as a single managed resource — emerged in the 1960s and gradually took hold in Europe, bringing an integrated, strategic approach to planning and managing urban trees for their environmental, economic and social benefits.

^{Today: the tree as climate infrastructure}

In the twenty-first century the street tree has acquired perhaps its most urgent role yet. Faced with rising urban temperatures, heatwaves, flooding and biodiversity loss, European cities increasingly regard trees as one of the most effective nature-based solutions available: cooling streets, absorbing stormwater, cleaning air and supporting mental and physical health. The COVID-19 pandemic sharpened public appreciation of accessible green space still further. Cities now pursue explicit canopy-cover targets and diverse, climate-resilient planting — even as the same warming climate stresses the trees themselves through drought, pests and disease.

Across four centuries the European street tree has been, by turns, a defence against cannon, a prop for canal banks, a symbol of royal power, a cure for industrial squalor and a tool of climate survival. Its history is, in miniature, a history of what Europeans have most feared and most valued in their cities.

^{Selected sources}

Orion Magazine, “The Peculiar Relationship Between City Trees and Medieval Battle”; DeepRoot Blog, “History of Street Trees in Holland” and “History of Street Trees in Paris”; Smart Cities Dive, “History of Street Trees in Paris: The Golden Age of the Boulevard”; Arnold Arboretum (Harvard), “How Trees Were Urbanized”; Forest History Society, “History of Urban Forests”; Springer, “A History of Urban Forests and Trees in Europe”; Forest Information System for Europe (EEA), “Urban forestry: multi-functional greening in the city.”

The Kauri Glen Tree Top Walkway is just that — an elegant wooden walkway that enables the casual hiker to view the forest floor from the heights of its leafy canopy. It is a bird’s eye view.

I walked the tree top trail with my grandson the other day. We both love a walk in the woods. Never one to miss the opportunity to encourage my grandson’s interest in photography, I looped my camera strap around his shoulder and had him direct our photographic exploration.

Today’s photograph is my favourite image from his session portfolio.

words are superfluous . . . these ferns express all that need be conveyed

I enjoy opportunities to walk leisurely and closely examine store fronts. And, for the most part, they are store fronts and not display windows. The latter suggests intention, if not also artful pretence, that I find rare in the commercial districts of Auckland’s central city and its neighbouring suburbs.

The frontage of the retail shops that populate the thoroughfares I walk on a regular basis are for the most part austere, some would say threadbare and utilitarian. The shop owners, often first or second generation immigrants, find the daily struggles of keeping their businesses fully stocked and interiors ordered sufficiently demanding tasks. Concerns for the aesthetics of store-front windows are secondary, given the demands of securing goods and maintaining shelf stock, even superfluous if the business is already well known and customer traffic is brisk.

The store front in today’s entry is a visual presentation in two parts. There is first the window itself, an unassuming indeed chaotic mural of what has been or could be the start a tattoo design - the past, next or first ink-and-needle to skin. Smaller placards, either mounted on interior walls or held upright in easels, line the shop’s interior ledges and floor.

The image also presents a second showcase: an unobstructed and welcoming view, set in deep recess, of the shop’s interior of highly polished floor, of gleaming chest against gauzy curtain and of leg and foot — awaiting customers suggesting the parlour is popular and held in some regard.

I believe the photograph is a handsome black & white image and an entertaining story.

High Street, a narrow thoroughfare directly east of Queen Street in Auckland’s city centre, begins at Shortland Street and terminates, as High Street, at Victoria Street East. From the south side of Victoria Street, the diminutive roadway continues until Mayoral Drive sporting its new name as Lorne Street.

Lorne Street rivals Dominion Road for its density of Asian food restaurants and cafes. I am fairly confident that the cuisines of the vast majority of Asian countries, including India, are represented in the eatery establishments along Lorne Street.

Plus Chicken, the shop featured in this post’s image, is a takeaway-only restaurant on Lorne Street. It is as tiny as the street on which it is located. The fried chicken offerings are prepared in the Taiwanese/Chinese style, a preparation quite different from American fried chicken. Unlike the traditional presentation of American fried chicken of bone-in chicken fried in a thick and bready crust, the Taiwanese/Chinese style prepares boneless chicken that has been flattened into a cutlet and coated with sweet potato or tapioca/potato starch rather than wheat flour. A compliment of seasoning, and notably fried Thai basil leaves, are added after the chicken is fried rather than before frying, as is done in the American style. Finally, Taiwanese/Chinese style fried chicken is served in a paper bag and eaten in the bag from one edge of the chicken to the other, or sometimes on a skewer stick.

As for the photograph, the late afternoon light against the store front first caught my eye. The splash of orange window transom against the black and white building materials also interested me. Finally, the frame within frame portrait of the chef added a nice compositional touch.

There are many paths I could take to get from my apartment in the Wynyard Quarter precinct of Auckland’s city centre to the Auckland Art Gallery at the corner of Wellesley Street East and Kitchener Street, a distance on foot of 2km. With deliberate consistency, I elect to traverse the path that takes me across High Street to Lorne Street and then through Khartoum Place.

This premeditated route speaks to a deeply held belief of mine that a walk ought to embrace purpose and significance beyond physical exertion. It should command the senses, and foremost among them for a photographer: what might be seen.

For me, Khartoum Place is the stuff of a pilgrim’s journey for a three-fold reason, at once personal, civic and visual. With regard to the personal, my wife completed her academic training in the discipline of history, and specifically as a student of the 19th century American South. Her dissertation examined the remarkable life of Margaret Wickliffe Preston as recorded in the voluminous family papers housed in the Special Collections of the University of Kentucky Library.

The preparatory work to celebrate properly the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution — the amendment that extended to women the right to vote in all elections, local and national — promoted her to refocus her work from the antebellum South to the Reconstruction Period of the latter 19th century and to what many historians refer to as the Second Reconstruction of the 20th century.

With our emigration to New Zealand in 2018, Randolph cemented her scholarly focus on the unique women’s suffrage history of her adopted country. In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant to women the right of universal suffrage, the power by parliamentary act to vote in all public elections. And that singular fact of world history brings me to the second fold of a pilgrimage to be understood in 3 parts.

Khartoum Place is the home of Auckland's Women’s Suffrage Memorial. I have previously posted about the Women’s Suffrage Mural at Khartoum Place. Suffice it to say here, I pause in a reverent moment to think about the extraordinary struggle that led to universal suffrage in New Zealand and to the pride I hold for the scholarly work that Randolph continues to contribute to our understanding of that history.

Finally, there is the photographic - a captivating visual celebration that architects and artists brilliantly captured in form, line and colour. With my photograph, taken from the stairs that lead from Kitchener Street to the Lorne Street plaza, I have attempted to capture the architectural beauty of the memorial plaza.

From Greymouth we drove to Lake Brunner for several days of long walks and relaxing amidst stark winter beauty.

The last leg of our journey took us south on SH6 toward Fox Glacier, our next destination. We stopped along the way in the delightful seaside town of Hokitika and toured the nearby Wēta Pounamu Pathway exhibition centre. It not being tourist season, we had Fox Glacier Village and its environs to ourselves. The views of the Southern Alps, and notably of the Fox Glacier, were stunning.

Below are 4 galleries of my favourite photographs from the trip.

I am an easy mark for any scene bathed in dappled light. So, too, for Gothic Revival church architecture.

To have found, while on an urban walk with my grandson, the St Patrick’s Cathedral awash with light & shadow from late afternoon illumination was a splendid circumstance. What I could not have expected was to also find a holographic-like effect on the church’s gabled roof.

Let’s unpack the visual effect. The roof line is bedecked with six gabled dormer windows. I believe the architectural term for the window on this Gothic Revival building is a lucarne. A properly trained architectural historian will prove me wrong, again.

Over the years hard rains have weathered the roof tiles unevenly in perfectly vertical trails downward from either edge of each diminutive window. As a consequence, the sharply angled light of late afternoon may create the ephemeral effect of pairs of the columns — faux pilasters— superimposed underneath each of the six gabled dormer windows, as illustrated in today’s image.

The overall visual effect was intoxicating.

Installed in stages from 1913 to 1923 and refurbished in recent years with LED lighting, the 37 ornamental street lamps along the port side of Quay Street are known collectively as Auckland’s Red Fence.

The array of ornamental street lamps are a distinctive feature of Quay Street. They are especially stunning at night, as my photograph from a previous post illustrates:

This is why, as often as is possible, one should time a photographic walk in anticipation of the golden hour.

Vulcan Lane is a pedestrian-only thoroughfare that wends its way eastward from Queen Street, crosses High Street and ends its journey at O’Connell Street. Other lanes or diminutive streets in Auckland Central, some pedestrians-only and others with limited one-way car traffic patterns, include Fort, Snickel, Durham, Imperial and Bacons. All share an old-world charm, characterised by distinctive human-scale architecture, boutique retail shops and atmospheric cafes.

Heritage New Zealand offers an informative narrative of Vulcan Lane’s history as a commercial and social destination within Auckland Central.

One section of the narrative that I found especially noteworthy reads as follows:

In the 1920’s the lane was widened by about 15ft on the south side, and new commercial buildings were being erected in the area. Any new buildings constructed in the lane had to conform with the Council’s requirements and hence the lane adopted a wider more spacious and sunlit appearance. 1

Few areas of public policy have taken more hits by critics on the left- and right-side of the political fence than zoning & planning requirements. The problems are real, but complex, and consequential. However, one need only walk the length of Vulcan Lane to conclude that the judicious application of zoning and design frameworks to preserve the historically significant character of modest areas of a city can be enormously beneficial to the life of a city — to our liveability in it and to our understanding of its changing character, both continuous and adaptive, over time.

The particular strength and vitality of the weekly Wynyard Quarter night markets is that the weekend events attract families that could not otherwise afford a dinner outing. The night market culinary offerings are varied, tasty and moderately priced.

Parents also know that the Silo Park playground and neighbouring public spaces are fun and safe. There is a palpable sense of shared responsibility in Wynyard Quarter -- we watch-out for one another, residents and visitors alike.

Time wandering amongst the crowds at my precinct’s weekend night markets is a restorative tonic for me.

There are layers of biography and explanatory text associated with this image.

Let’s start with the ethics of candid street photography. Is a candid street photograph, one taken without the knowledge or permission of the subject, a form of theft or at least an invasion of personal space? I have not fully formed an answer to that question and, in not doing so, I have resolved to forego any commercial profit from this stealthy practice. I won’t sell a print of a person from whom I have neither obtained permission nor offered compensation. And my Substack, by intent, was never meant to be a commercial endeavour.

As to the question of why I was attracted to his profile, photographically speaking, my answer is rather subjective and speculative. I am fascinated by how people present themselves in public places - from styles of dress and bodily or jewelled ornamentation to facial expressions and postures of engagement or withdrawal.

In the instance of this bus rider, I was keenly interested in the intensity of his facial expression; and therein lies the speculative rub. Perhaps it is the learned habit of someone who needs to say ‘don’t mess with me.’ Or the assumed expression of someone lost in deep thought. Lastly, and more simply, it could be the countenance of someone grateful for a moment’s respite on a bus.

I know this much: I love the endless trail of his beard.

Looking up, down and behind are critical photographic prompts. In the instance of this entry, down and behind were the operative impulses.

Inspired by a video presented at the YouTube channel Photographic Inspiration, I took a walk along a familiar path in Wynyard Quarter. The practice frame for this outing was to maintain the discipline of looking up, down and behind. The mantra served me well.

Looking down rather than straight ahead allowed me to spot a storm sewer grating. The strong repeating pattern of geometric rectangles served as contrasting background for the dominant figure of the red iron valve, itself encased within a concentric circle. As my wife remarked when she saw the image: “It is something my husband would notice and consider visually curious.” The cement casing of the storm sewer on which the grating was placed punctuated the interplay of geometries.

Farther on, I walked behind a structure at one end of the Jellicoe Street carpark, which revealed another odd treasure. Someone had taken the time to paint a piece of corrugated siding that lined one edge of a raised street garden. Capturing the photograph with a wide-open aperture at close proximity ensured that the siding and flowers, with their dominant red and delicate yellow hues, would attract the eye of viewer. The visual wash of the gauzy background, the artistic consequence of a shallow depth of field, added a nice finishing touch to the photographic elements of the composition.

I was reminded of an old joke shared amongst architects:

“How do you know that there’s an architecture convention taking place in town?

Everyone in a crush of pedestrians is looking up.”