Changing Auckland: Grey Lynn's passage from migrant hub to vegan enclave

Tuesday, 29 December 2020

Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua remembers Grey Lynn as a 'diverse, fascinating neighbourhood'.

The Auckland of 2021 looks very different to how some of its residents remember it. This Stuff series looks what the city used to be, and the place it's set to become.

There’s barely any halt in the traffic as the lights at the corner of Karangahape and Ponsonby roads flick from green to red, cars skating round the corner on the tail end of an orange.

But in the mid-70s, at the time of the dawn raids, this intersection was brought to a standstill by police searching out alleged overstayers from the Pacific Islands.

They timed it for kicking out time at the nearby pubs, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua says.

Art space Studio One Toi Tū has taken over what used to be the Newton police station.

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Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua in front of the building that now occupies 15 Williamson Avenue, where he grew up.

“What you would see would be long lines of brown people having to show identification and the other thing you would notice is […] palangis just walking straight through.”

Strickson-Pua's family at home on Williamson Avenue. It was his parents’ first home when they moved from Samoa.

The crossroads is just past Studio One Toi Tū, the old Newton Police Station – another spot where Māori and Pasifika men used to be rounded up at closing time, Strickson-Pua says. It shut its doors as a cop shop in 1969, reopening as an arts centre a decade later. The reverend would be there every Tuesday in his days as a youth worker with the King Cobras.

Then a block further down, Western Park, where Ponsonby workers on lunch breaks sprawl in the shade of sculptures offering commentary on the destruction of Auckland's architectural heritage.

When Strickson-Pua was growing up in Grey Lynn, it was a melting pot of different cultures.

“This used to be a run down area. It was amazing when the gentrification came in, you knew straight away because all of a sudden these parks were being upgraded.

“Then you move all of the population over to south Auckland and yet no infrastructure had been done.”

The Pacific Island Presbyterian Church on Edinburgh Street was a hub for new migrants to Auckland.

Strickson-Pua now lives on Waiheke Island, but Grey Lynn and Ponsonby are his old stomping ground. His parents moved into 15 Williamson Avenue when they arrived from Samoa, and the family shifted around the corner to Scanlan Street when he was 8.

It was the “working class ethnic ghetto entry point for new migrants”, he says – “a most fascinating diverse neighbourhood”.

Not that he thought of it as diverse at the time: “We thought everyone had a Chinese, an Indian, a Yugoslavian, a Pākehā [aunty] and that was normal”.

Rose Greaves was sent a letter complaining about her living in Ponsonby.

All of these aunties, his mum’s friends from her factory, were summoned to the house in 1963 for the queen’s visit.

Williamson Avenue was a main thoroughfare for the procession, and so his mum hosted her own version of high tea overlooking the road. “We all had to wave Union Jacks.”

Up on Karangahape Road, we trace his walk to church, past the Tesla showroom and Pink Pussycat strip club, swinging a right at adult store Peaches and Cream.

Edinburgh Street is home to the Pacific Island Presbyterian Church, founded as the Pacific Islanders Congregational Church in 1947.

Wise Boys co-founders, brothers Luke and Tim Burrows.

It was the hub of the community, Strickson-Pua remembers, with Sunday school so full that they would bring their chairs out onto the street and have lessons outside: “We thought that was absolutely neat”.

It was a different place back then, Rose Greaves agrees. She first moved to Grey Lynn in the early 1980s, when kids played out on the street and neighbours left their doors unlocked: “You could go over and visit and they might not be home but you could still make yourself a cup of tea”.

But the open door policy started to change as families shifted out south and west and community connections were lost. As the area started to fragment, racism became more obvious, she says.

“There became a lot of skinheads, they were terrible. You couldn’t feel safe at night if you were brown skinned.”

At the Grey Lynn shops, the shops are getting more upmarket, but the long-term homeless remain – for now.

After a decade, she moved south to be closer to her job at Middlemore Hospital, but she never planned on staying away permanently. In 2012 she returned, moving into a Housing New Zealand enclave on Vermont Street.

It was there she had a letter delivered earlier this year telling her she was an “embarrassment to Ponsonby”.

The area had changed in the years she’d been away: the vegetables had got more expensive, flash houses had popped up in subdivided sections where driveways used to be, flash cars crowded the narrow streets and people didn’t look you in the eye and say good morning like they used to.

“I felt ignored walking along the street.”

At the Grey Lynn shops, the shop fronts reflect the march of gentrification: vegan bakery, vegan deli, boutique florist, vegetarian cafe, vegan burger joint.

The latter – Wise Boys – was founded by Luke Burrows and his brother Tim. They took over the lease of the old fish and chip shop 18 months ago. Next door to them, a couple of high-end clothing stores have opened recently, and at the other end an op shop is about to close.

It seems like a conscious effort to make the area more upmarket, Burrows says.

So is Wise Boys part of Grey Lynn’s gentrification?

“It is probably true.

“Our clientele are quite different to people who went to the old fish and chip shop.”

But shops and restaurants don’t cause gentrification, he says: when house prices are as unaffordable as they are locally, it’s only natural that businesses start to mirror that.

Still, Wise Boys has tried to become a part of the neighbourhood rather than impose themselves, he says. They’ll give out food to the local homeless, “but there are fewer and fewer of those people around”.

Greaves suspects the march of gentrification means it’s a matter of time before Kāinga Ora comes knocking, wanting to move her and her neighbours on and sell to developers. But they should expect a fight on their hands if that happens, she says.

“I’d occupy to stop that happening and to fight it to the end.

“I’m here till I die.”