Assoc Prof Alexander Trapeznik outside the old NMA building
on the corner of Water St.
Decades of neglect may have saved them but further
decades of neglect could see their demise.
The bell is tolling for many slowly crumbling warehouses,
factories, workshops, and head offices in what used to be
Dunedin's waterfront business and industrial precinct.
They are concentrated cheek by jowl in blocks bounded by
Rattray, Princes, Police and Cumberland streets. Many are
still being used but some are a shadow of their former
selves.
Some have been converted to new uses but many of the more
than 100-year-old buildings have fallen into the sort of
disrepair that could cost their owners a lot of money to fix.
The NMA wool and manure store.
Historian Alexander Trapeznik, an associate professor at
the University of Otago, says the buildings might be part of
one of the most significant and under-valued mercantile
heritage precincts in New Zealand (see diagram Page 47).
It grew in the mid- to late 19th-century, when gold and then
a rapidly developing cropping and pastoral farming trade
helped a booming Dunedin become the unabashed financial,
commercial and industrial centre of colonial New Zealand.
The buildings were built on land reclaimed from the harbour
and spoke of a time when Dunedin showed the colony - and the
Empire - how feasible it was to achieve wealth in a new
country thousands of miles from the United Kingdom.
The second NMA head office.
"The buildings in this precinct are a tangible link to a
very important time for Dunedin and for New Zealand, and I
think you can make a very strong case for the waterfront
precinct to be recognised not just regionally but nationally,"
says Prof Trapeznik.
"The shipping companies that were based here, the stock and
station agencies that were based here, all these businesses
have an enduring legacy that is of national importance as a
tangible reminder of the development of New Zealand, let
alone Dunedin."
They left an enduring legacy of a kind that in Dunedin, as
elsewhere, has been the poor second cousin to grand public
buildings, churches, and houses in the ongoing effort to
protect and improve significant historic properties.
The first NMA head office.
In work he hopes will help improve the balance, Prof
Trapeznik has researched 68 mercantile and industrial buildings
in the old waterfront precinct, and has compiled a working list
of 77 more. He hopes to have the work published.
The list adds context - and names - to the sometimes "ghostly
and often decrepit monuments to Dunedin's former glory" that
Prof Trapeznik says are hidden in an under-appreciated part
of the southern central city.
Many on his list relate to the region's early development in
cropping and farming, and especially the stock and station
industry, which gave farmers the expertise to sell their
goods, store them, and transport them.
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