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| Part 2 of 4, P J Hogan's Lithograph of Auckland in 1852 |
The town was already changed out of all recognition just thirty years after Fred Hannken settled his family in Queen St.
The following extract from the Auckland Weekly News helps us form a picture. It describes the town of Auckland in those early years.
"In our present issue we give the first of a series of four
views of Auckland in 1852 from the pencil of the late Mr P. J. Hogan, of
Parnell and which were subsequently lithographed in London and published at the
old New Zealander office, Shortland Street. These sketches recall to the memory
of many Auckland residents reminiscences of the olden times.
In that thirty
years times have changed and men have changed with them....Even the physical
features of the harbour of Auckland are altered, through the changes which the
growth of the commerce of the port and the railway system have brought
about.
...At this period the town was practically comprised in a line drawn from
Princes St down ‘Generals Hill’ at the road past the Northern Club was called,
up Victoria Street to Hobson St, thence to the sea and along the beach to
Soldier’s Point (Fort Britomart) and thence to the point of commencement.
The
portion west and south of Hobson St was best known as ‘Chapel Hill’ which in
the olden days was protected by Ligar’s Redoubt situated on an allotment
opposite the Scotia Hotel, Hobson St and the eastern entrenchments of which
disappeared when the allotments were lit in building sections by the Board of
Education.
South and west of these boundary lines were only a few scattered
houses in the various streets with considerable patches of scrub and tea tree.
Hobson St, south of Victoria St, had scarcely a house on it, while Pitt St and
Karangahappe Rd to the Windmill simply existed on the map.
Upper Queen St was a
footpath leading through tangled fern across a deep gully while Upper Symonds
St and Khyber Pass Rd were only about to be formed by working parties of the 58th
Regiment.
The principal outlet to the country and by which the whole traffic
passed being Parnell, Newton and the whole of the district west of Hobson St,
Freeman’s Bay and Ponsonby lay in a state of nature, with here and there a
settler’s residence in the expanse of fern. Mr Probert in Newton and Mr Cox in
Cook St and Freeman’s Bay were pioneers of civilisation in these benighted
districts.
As for aristocratic Ponsonby it was less known that Kikowhakerere.
Its rival, Parnell or to speak by the card ‘Mechanic’s Hill’ was then, as now,
the sanctuary of Government officials and had a strong ecclesiastical flavour
about it. A few houses were clustered on St Barnabas Point, while Bull’s
grocery, Tom Johnson’s Windsor Castle, Mr Vidal’s, Mr Elliott’s and Dr Pollen’s
dwellings were the leading features of the Parnell main road, Colonel Hulme and
Major Mafaou, near the top of the hill, forming the outlying posts in that
direction, while from the road southward to the Domain the gun-brown tern
reigned supreme.
... In Mechanics Bay (Waipapa) at that date, the tide
laved the sandy beach of the Strand, lined from end to end with native canoes,
whose owners, at their tents on the beach, at the native hostelry, drove a brisk
trade in produce and kept the bay jocund with song and jest and dance alike, on
the beach and in the raupo huts on the hill above the bridge.
Auckland Weekly News 11 October 1884 Supplement page 1 and 3
