ON THE EDGE OF TOWN
Greg Bruce chronicles a week in the life of St Kevins Arcade.
When you walk up to Everybody Eats at about 6.50pm on Monday, a friendly waiter seats you at one of the many communal tables full of people who may or may not have incomes or homes or regular meals and you sit there silently, steadily dismissing every single one of your standard conversational openings.
“What do you do?” reveals itself as stupid. “Where are you from?” is thoughtless. Your standard set-pieces about the madness of Auckland property prices are obviously obscene.
If you previously thought at all about the lives of the homeless, you thought of them as living in a different world. You thought of them as “them”. You thought this as recently as while walking past some outside the Auckland City Mission on your way up here from your office at 6.30pm, darkness upon you and the cold descending.
Now, here, sitting among them, lifting forkfuls of the same food to your mouth they are lifting to theirs, it’s much harder to think that way.
When your meal is finished, you can choose whether or not to pay and how much to pay. This is obviously important because although the food is mostly rescued and the time of the volunteers is free, there are still significant costs in organising and running a kitchen turning out roughly 250 three-course meals in two hours, and there are plenty of people eating who can’t afford to pay at all.
Over the coming days and weeks, you find yourself thinking about the life circumstances of the 250 people who dined alongside you that night, because that is the way life works, and you come to feel the distance between you shrink, which is the way a sense of community grows.
By the end of your meal, you had discovered that your nearest dining companions were in fact a student and a barber but that discovery had required a lot of conversational fumbling and the amount of relief you had felt upon discovering it made you question many things about the way you view the world.
ST KEVINS Arcade was opened in 1924 and ever since it has had about the prettiest spot in the city to sit on a sunny morning with a coffee and newspaper and think about life and the day ahead. The wall of glass at its end, looking out over Myers Park and across to the central city skyline has pretty much always played host to a cafe or tea house and always should.
There was the golden period of K Rd department stores and there was the arrival of the motorway overbridge and the growth of the red light district, there were the years when
Alleluya Cafe thrived as the centre of some sort of bohemian dream, there was the 2015 sale to property developer Icon Group, there was the 18 month, $2.5 million renovation and then there’s whatever now is.
“It’s in a transition period,” says Lucy Suttor, who two months ago opened a pop-up space at St Kevins called Nicetouch Massage and has also worked behind the bar at Whammy for the past two years. “It’s trying to work out what it is again.”
The aesthetic of the place is different since the sale. The floor, which used to be made up of 1970s era ceramic tiles, has been relaid with granite and basalt tiles, decrepit timber joinery and plaster have been repaired, brass inlays have been inlaid, signage has been improved, boring infrastructural issues have been addressed. Xanthe White, an upstairs tenant, helped arrange some indoor plants.
Some rents went up and some tenants moved out, some sweet deals were offered and some other tenants moved in. There are quite a few young entrepreneurs now and there are more food retailers: Takeaway joint Lord of the Fries is out the front and Bestie Cafe and Gemmayze Street restaurant are down the back. In the middle are cafes Egg & Spoon and Fort Greene, bakery Tart and bar/restaurant Acho.
Icon Group’s Adam Stevenson, who’s the man to contact if you want to lease a space in St Kevins, says he doesn’t want it to turn the place into a food court. “If it’s all just food,” he says, “you lose the culture part of it.”
There are retail stores and a couple of bookshops. Upstairs are a few offices. Downstairs are some bars. Outside, and regularly coming in to the arcade from both the park and K Rd, are visitors of wildly varying means and with wildly varying desires for what they hope this place will become or not become.
The question at the heart of St Kevins, as with any beloved public space, is: who does it belong to? Auckland? The Icon Group? The young entrepreneurs and others who are trying to build something here? The people who see this place as the centre of some sort of community?
“No one, no subset, has ownership of this place,” Stevenson says, “But everyone is welcome.”
JUST BEFORE 6.30am on Wednesday, several dozen people in predominantly Lycra and Lycraequivalents are waiting to disappear down the stairs to pay $15 to enter the soon-to-be heaving darkness of Whammy Bar, where noted DJ Chiccoreli is going to be on the decks spinning some premium drum n bass.
Whammy is a rock ’n’roll bar owned by industry-leading audio engineer Tom Anderson. There’s an illuminated bFM sign on the wall above a Guns n’ Roses pinball machine. It’s unusual for it to host a dance party, but then St Kevins is an unusual place.
“Party first, work later” reads the T-shirt on co-founder of Morning People Jamie Newman. He’s on the door, taking the entry fee and he yells over the music, frequently telling me things he doesn’t want me to write about, including the chaos of the coat/bag storage area and the graffiti on the desk in front of him (“Bitches be frontin’. [illegible] dis hoe. Im satan for days.”), which, he says, doesn’t at all represent the Whammy ethos or the views of its owners.
Newman says Morning People started with the idea that if you want to dance at a dance party, the experience actually sucks. You’re getting bumped into, people are spilling drinks and the dancing itself is much worse than
rhythmically the a wild little The blitzed and cautious dancing sweaty participants and but by and creatively. those for non-stop. believe most at the of it The very the to crowd be, instructions back both is it’s to straight them Chiccoreli there to a for high were an level hour basically of and intensity a to half, take and which the keep beats is not the They’re usual way serving for a kombucha DJ to manage and a coffee set. and some Tart Bakery doughnuts upstairs, are coming but the down whole later thing from is officially Somebody drug- in and exercise alcohol-free. gear asks Newman if she can take her companion in for a look. He says yes, but the companion takes only a quick look before going straight back out again. “You can only lead a horse to water,” Newman says.
Chiccoreli plays Fossil by Data 3 and the crowd goes wild. He gets a similar response to
Anything For You by Macca and Loz Contreras but honestly he could have dropped the entirety of Engelbert Humperdinck’s 2017 album The
Man I Want To Be and as long as it was playing at 175 beats per minute there’s a good chance nobody would have much cared.
The first to leave are a trio of sweaty 20-somethings, wearing an exercise blend of Lycra and shorts. It’s about 7.30am when they come out of the darkness into the morning light and not-yet-noise of K Rd. “Wammmmm!” one of them says, echoing either the music or the ringing in his ears. “That’s a good way to wake up, eh?”
More begin to emerge. A young man says, “That was awesome.” His companion says: “It was awesome”. A 30-something couple come out holding hands. The general vibe of the people coming out is amped.
‘No one, no subset, has ownership of this place but everyone is welcome.’ Adam Stevenson