Bottle move?
Calls to shift selfie-magnet closer to town to encourage spending
Hauraki District Council is floating the idea of relocating the 50-year-old world famous in New Zealand L & P bottle.
The town’s giant bottle has been such a selfie-magnet that its current location on the eastern outskirts of Paeroa is not maximising its potential to lure dollars out of visitors, some say.
Hauraki mayor Toby Adams says a move closer to shops in the centre of town will be floated with the community.
With work about to start on the Wharf St wharf and pontoon, which will link town with the Paeroa Historical Maritime Museum and Hauraki Rail Trail via riverboat, he said it was time to look at how best to maximise on visits by tourists.
“There’s been some conversation that we need to bring it back into the town. Wharf St is going to be part of the focus for the town,” Adams says.
“If we can encourage people to park in town and get their photo in the middle of the town we might be able to catch more of their dollars.”
He said the drawcard of the bottle was “huge” for Paeroa.
“They’re travelling far and wide to have their photo taken with the bottle.
“It’s rare you drive past and there’s not someone getting a photo there. I’ve done that at least half a dozen times with different MPs.”
He said there was sometimes confusion with another small bottle at the L&P Cafe, which cafe manager Kristie Taukiri confirmed.
“We quite often get people coming in waiting for friends who said they’d meet them at the big bottle and they’ve got it wrong.
“And you see people taking photos and I think oh people are going to laugh at them. Some people like to take photos at ours and the big bottle.”
The bottle was moved to its present site 20 metres back into the Ohinemuri Reserve in 2002 to enable photographers to avoid dodging traffic in the middle of State Highway 2.
Here it is set amongst lemon trees. Kristie Taukiri says people pick lemons so they can have a lemon from Paeroa, and she thinks it works well where it is.
The bottle began from notso-humble beginnings as a replica space rocket for Paeroa’s 1967 Christmas promotion.
Paeroa was to ‘rocket into
Christmas’, records the late local curator and historian of the Paeroa and District Museum, Graham Watton.
The original 7 metre high 1.3 metre diameter structure was made of six stacked concrete water troughs with a fibreglass “neck” housing a public address system that blared music and announcements during the promotion.
It was then painted in
Lemon & Paeroa bottle colours before in early 1969 being stored away.
Since being rebuilt and established on its current site later that year, the “bottle” has become one of the most wellknown and photographed structures in New Zealand and reproduced on postage stamps, wrote Watton on Paeroa’s promotional website www.paeroa.org.nz.