When did Karangahape Road become so posh?

Wednesday, 6 January 2021

K' Rd historian Edward Bennett takes us on a tour and talks about the recent gentrification of the famous street.

You’ll see Six sitting just outside St Kevin’s Arcade. She sits with a strap around her neck, her Rollei 35 TE film camera hanging and waiting.

It’s waiting to snap friends, a passersby or anything potentially newsworthy. Because Six is a journalist. She’s the editor and publisher of the K’Road Chronicle, a small publication printed on A4 wheat paper that promises “Journalism for the Karangahape Road Community”.

The photos are all developed from film, shot from this camera which is at least 40 years old. The stories, printed using vegetable-based ink, are a variety of jokes, local profiles and information for the homeless community.

The jokes, Six tells me later, are to get the readers talking to each other. “They’ll tell a friend, and say, ‘look at this, I read it in the Chronicle’.”

* The different waves of Auckland's K' Rd

* Prostitutes, opium and perfect children: the chequered history of Myers Park

Former Karangahape Road streetie, Six, publishes The K Road Chronicle.

Crowds gather at St Kevin’s Arcade on Karangahape Rd.

Six is busy, in deep conversation on the footpath.

I’m waiting to grab her ear because I want to know more about this Karangahape Rd community.

Six used to be homeless, and says you can’t easily tell who is and isn't homeless.

I’ve lived in Auckland for the past four years, always near K Rd. During that short time, the changes have seemed fast and unrelenting. The makeup of the street, the businesses which choose to trade here and the clientele of the many bars and clubs, seem to gradually change each day. It’s a space where gentrification can be seen clear as day.

Six doesn’t just report on the community here, she sits right in the centre of it. The first day we meet, there’s a queue of people waiting to talk. A woman is making her way through Karangahape Rd to meet each business owner, pitching an idea of lockers for the homeless. She stops to speak with Six, who was homeless for many years after 2010. The woman wants Six’s backing, which she gets, easy. The next person to stop by shares some gossip from the homeless community. Now it’s my turn.

I ask Six what to call her in this story, does she have a last name? “Call me Six,” she replies. A single word does the trick.

Las Vegas Strip Club on Karangahape Rd, before it closed in 2015.

Like the centrepiece of a jigsaw puzzle, Six fits perfectly into the Karanghape community. She sees and connects with almost the full array of the street.

She knows the homeless and the beggars by name, and notes they often aren’t the same people.

Inside the Las Vegas Strip Club, which lasted from 1962 to 2015.

“These Christians come around once a week handing out pizza, food and often money. They have signs saying ‘for the homeless only’, but how do you know if someone’s homeless? When I was homeless, I’d often wear a suit. I figured if I was going to be homeless, I’d wear the best outfit I got,” she says.

The Vegas Girl sign is still there, even after the club closed.

The street is known for being a bit alternative, a bit edgy, filled with people who just seem a bit more mysterious than the matching white frocks down at the Viaduct.

Homelessness has been present here for as long as most the community can remember. In recent history, K Rd was seen as a red-light district as well. Although, that’s changing.

When I first moved to Auckland, there were three prominent strip clubs on the street. There was a porn cinema, too.

I used to work early shifts at the Stuff newsroom, which sat at the end of K Rd. I’d arrive each morning as the women of the street would start heading off from their spot, at about 6am.

In 2015, the Las Vegas Strip Club closed its doors. It was remembered as “legendary” in its obituary, and for some reason its sign – ‘the Vegas girl’ – still adorns its old building.

Merge Cafe on Auckland's Karangahape Road is a regular hangout for the city's homeless community. They offer affordable food and a warm, friendly environment for those in need.

Mermaids closed, too. Its premises, with the same blacked out windows, now looks abandoned. Apparently, it's been converted into some form of housing.

And the last time I dragged myself to the office before 7am, the streets were noticeably empty.

Karangahape Road is home to cafe, bars, a few sex toy shops, secondhand stores and Cosmic.

Even Calendar Girls left its prime spot on the intersection of Karangahape Rd and Pitt St. It moved upstairs, making way for a family friendly pub serving a range of craft beer.

I ask Six if she, from her vantage on Karangahape Road itself, feels the street changing as fast as I can see it each day as I walk through. She says yes, it’s different. But change is not a bad thing. And, she says, it isn’t really changing that fast. She reckons it’s still one of the easiest places to find cannabis.

“Let’s be honest, if you want to find weed, spend half an hour on K Rd – and that’s if you don’t know anybody,” she says.

The change Six has seen, she says, is good. More expensive shops are opening up.

Karangahape Rd was the main shopping street of Auckland.

A Tesla shop sits further down Karangahape Rd, across the road from specialist bakeries. Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick based her election campaign in a storefront beside a laundromat. The shop owners and people who hang around this street can’t speak more highly of the MP, that she chose K Rd – rather than nearby Ponsonby – has them chuffed.

“You’ve got to remember,” Six says.

“This is very much a rainbow community. You’ve got gay couples, dual income, no kids. You’ve got Tesla on the corner, which is the natural evolution of things for this city to slowly expand.”

Along Karangahape Rd and down in Queen St, you can see where Auckland’s poverty and wealth collide.

According to Lifewise Trust, which operates a hangout space and charity cafe on Karangahape Rd, there are more than 150 homeless people in Auckland City. For the past 10 years, Merge Cafe has been giving jobs and skills to vulnerable people. It also subsidies meals for those who need them, funded by those who can afford a few flat whites.

Six says that mixing of people from all backgrounds at Merge offers hope for the rest of the community. She beleives that the gentrification of Karangahape Rd could lead to better options for those in poverty.

Caluzzi drag queen in action Karangahape Road K Rd

“I know people are upset about being pushed out, but Grey Lynn is just down the road,” she says.

As the gentrification of Karangahape Rd continues, there are questions about whether it will lose some of its character. Six doesn’t think that’s a major risk. For one, she says the legend of K Rd greatly exaggerates reality.

“People think it’s like Las Vegas and there're gangsters on every street and you can snort cocaine off a bar stool. It’s not like that and all, I don’t think it ever was.”

Historian Edward Bennett has meticulous notes about all of Auckland, but K Rd is special to him. It’s where he lives, where he shops, it has all he needs. We meet at in the café of a new office block that popped up about 10 years ago.

It’s a gratuitously modern and industrial building, named – with giant letters on the street front – IRONBANK.

Bennett grew up in Epsom but was pulled towards Karangahape Rd as he grew older. It became the place to be; with shops, nightclubs and also something of a spiritual home for Auckland's rainbow community.

But the K Rd we think of today isn't that old, Bennett says. The tattoo parlours and bars only started to make their way up to K Rd after being kicked off the waterfront.

Before 1989, there weren’t many clubs on Karangahape Rd, he says. One of the few was the Las Vegas Strip Club, which arrived in 1962. For years, it sat above a T&T Children’s Wear shop. Neighbouring businesses included green grocers, butchers and upholsterers.

K Rd was the main shopping zone, it had everything suburban Auckland would need or want. But that didn’t last forever.

In 1989, the clubs started to call Karangahape Rd home. By then, development of Auckland’s highways and urban sprawl had forced K Rd to change. Thousands of residents were pushed from their homes for the motorway system, and remaining housing was too expensive. Shopping moved to suburban malls, and the vacuum left on K Rd was filled with hospitality, cafés, strip clubs.

No longer was K Rd a practical street. The 90s was all about hedonism for those who could afford it.

Homosexual law reform of 1986 allowed gay nightclubs to come above ground, but Bennett says they’d always been around.

“The police had turned a blind to gay stuff, because everything had been secret. If you took any urban area like Wellington or Auckland there were establishments where there would always be trouble. There’d be fighting, people thrown out windows. And then there were places there was no trouble – the gay nightclubs were those,” he says.

The gay nightclubs sought spots where there would be no trouble, Bennett says. They wanted to keep a low profile, keep safe.

And while Karangahape Rd's red light activity has died down, the rainbow hotspots have thrived.

The club Family Bar is something of a K Rd icon. One of its biggest complaints is it's become too popular, with straights flocking in too.

The drag queens of Caluzzi are heroes of the street, and other bars, such as The Eagle, are reliably filled most afternoons.

While things change, much stays the same.

And as Six and Bennett remind me, it's about the people. The people who make up Karanhagape Rd, from the drag queens to barbers, see the road as more than another city street. They stick it out, printing newspapers, lobbying for resources to help the homeless.

They show no sign of going anywhere.

Six features in the Stuff webseries K Rd Chronicles. Season two premieres tomorrow on Play Stuff. Watch season one here.