Predesign: Tory Street

     http://risingtogale.com/tag/chinatown/

Tory Street is in a state of change. At either end of the street, there are solid buildings which give a semblance of permanence. At the northern end of Tory Street, Chris Parkin’s Museum Hotel has been facing Waitangi Park since its famous move in 1993. At the southern end, the Mt Cook Police Barracks has been looking down Tory Street from its Buckle Street corner since 1894.

Tory Street ends at Buckle Street, where the Mt Cook School has built an admirably contemporary new hall which was the venue for a crowded public meeting last year to discuss Option X. And as traffic from the Basin Reserve will be running under Tory Street, the problems of one of the city’s most slow-moving intersections should be over. There are no plans, though, to do anything about the intersection with Vivian Street, which carries three lanes of westbound vehicles facing traffic lights on every block.

Tory Street turns off into Haining Street. There is little evidence here of Wellington’s chinatown, which was located here and in parallel Frederick Street from the 19th century. The first Chinese occupants of these streets came from the goldfields of the South Island and ran laundries and fruit-selling businesses. There were ongoing complaints of ‘open vice’ in the two streets including prostitution, gambling and opium dens which provided ample material for racially-charged stories for the New Zealand Truth and were the scene of regular police raids up until the 1960s. Haining Street is probably best known for the murder of Joe Kum-Young, in 1905 by Lionel Terry, an English migrant with extreme racist views.