The changing face of Garden Place
We can look back in photographs like this to a time when people lived in houses not a stone’s throw from today’s council offices.
This is Dr Brewis, a well-known Hamilton figure, with his daughters on their front lawn. This house was on the hill where the Arcadia and adjoining buildings now stand, on the east side of Worley Place.
Garden Place was a sacred site for Maori before European settlement. Houses were built there well before 1900 when the “city centre” was in the Knox St to Collingwood St area. Garden Place hill was quite “out in the suburbs” in those days. As Hamilton expanded, families lived happily in the middle of town until the hill was removed in 1939/1940.
Most, if not all the houses on the hill, were relocated. From the early 1950s until the 1990s Garden Place was lined with shops and offices with car parking dominating the area. Nowadays we have shops, offices and once again residential dwellings, this time apartments instead of houses. I would hazard the guess that living in Garden Place now is not as quiet and idyllic as this photo suggests.
