Napier Art Deco Weekend Part One (History

jayoma

Napier Art Deco Weekend Part One (History - The Boring Post)

Feb 25, 2011 17:44

Hey guys. First off, I just want to say how tough it is to watch the news or update Yahoo these days with everything so bad down in Christchurch. When I first heard about it, I thought that they were just talking about another aftershock after that big one a few months ago (which is technically true but not what I was originally thinking), and I was sort of casual about telling people I was fine, but then I actually turned on the TV, and the footage just blew me away. It's a sad time in New Zealand right now, but the good news is that everyone's really coming together and helping out in a way that makes me feel better about the human race. I've donated to the Red Cross twice now, but I don't really know what to do besides that. I'm just really lucky to be nowhere near the aftermath and that none of my friends were trapped in the debris. I'm pretty sure I've contacted anyone who might've been on the South Island at the time, but it's possible that I've forgotten one or two people. Hopefully not. I'll keep you guys updated on everything going on here as I find out more.

That said, I did manage to have a lovely time in Napier for the Art Deco Weekend just a few days before the quake. Which is ironic in and off itself because the whole festival is supposed to celebrate the reconstruction of the city following the 1931 earthquake that leveled the entire area. I'm going to try to keep the comparisons to a minimum for obvious reasons, but it was very surreal to suddenly have reality reassert itself after living four days in a fantasy world. This is basically what happened:

Due to the strange scheduling of the Intercity Bus Lines, the absolute earliest that I could get out to Napier from Taupo was on the 1pm shuttle, which was due to arrive in Napier at 3pm. That meant hanging around the hostel for half the day and not really being productive for most of Thursday, but it paid off to be there before it really started up Friday morning. I actually ended up arriving around 3:30 or 4:00 due to road work, but I didn't really mind because the scenic drive from the mountains to the coast is pretty spectacular. As it turned out, I got off the bus just in time to get a call from Henry and Nikki, who had been in Napier since Monday and had had a few more days to explore the place. They advised me to go to the Art Deco Store ASAP because it was going to close at 5pm, and I wouldn't be able to get my tickets otherwise. Not one to ignore good advice, I went straight to the Criterion, had just a few minutes to admire the awesomeness of it (more on that later), and then set out to do that before the office closed for the day. I think I was supposed to get my tickets in the mail several days before leaving, but there was a technical SNAFU that caused "Nina Goff's" tickets to be delayed. I eventually got them reprinted, but it was just a little bit of a hassle to track them down. By the way, here's what my planned schedule looked like before leaving Taupo:

Thursday, February 17th:
3pm: Check into Criterion
6pm: Costume Capers

Friday, February 18th
Morning: Check out of Criterion, Check into Archie's Bunker
10am: Tea with the Stars at Holt Planetarium
1:30pm: Royal NZ Navy Band Concert
7:45pm: Those Magnificent Men Air Show
8:30pm: Big Sounds Tonight Concert at the Sound Shell
9pm: Skybeam

Saturday, February 19th
10am: Traction Trundle
2:30pm: Celtic Concert at St. Paul's Church
6:30pm: Twilight Toe Tap on Emerson Street
9:30pm: Saturday Night at the Shell

Sunday, February 20th
10:30am: Soap Box Derby outside the Masonic Hotel
1pm: Gatsby Picnic
3pm: Dry Boat Racing at Tom Parker Fountain

Considering the absolutely massive amount of events going on throughout the weekend (go here to see all of them-->http://www.artdeconapier.com/Programme_43.aspx), that was a very short list, but I had to narrow them down by price and availability. By the time we got to ordering tickets, a lot of the things we wanted to see were already fully booked, like the Jitterbug Dance Lessons and Fish n' Flicks. I figured that signing up for too much might not leave a lot of time in-between for relaxing, exploring, eating, and anything else that might pop up. So I kept the official plan modest and left room for surprises. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I had picked up my tickets and looked at the stubs that I realized that the NZ Royal Band Concert for 1:30pm was actually in Hastings, the sister city of Napier. I hadn't noticed that on the brochure and had no way of getting to Hastings, so that meant missing out on that one. Fortunately, it was only $7.50 for that one, so it wasn't a huge loss. Henry and Nikki were in a similar boat for that one.

With that all straightened out, I then proceeded back to the Criterion to check out the place a bit more. I can't stress just how cool that building was. It was really a shame that I could only get a reservation for one night because I would've loved to have stayed there for the rest of my trip. I couldn't believe it was a backpackers because it reminded me of a four or five star hotel from an old film noir. Here's what it looked like from the outside.

A backpackers? Seriously?

And then the inside....

The lounge area, kitchen/dining room, and hallways

Balcony leading out from the lounge and the view

So that was where I got to stay for the first night. The actual bedrooms were a little bit more like your standard backpacker fare, but there were tons of perks like complimentary breakfast to make it even cooler. After I had checked in and claimed a bunk, I decided to take my costume for a test run. I had bought three different dresses in Taupo for day wear and evening wear, so I was pretty psyched to actually try some of it on. A few people had been walking around in costume when I arrived, so I figured I wouldn't stand out too much.

Okay. This was both a great idea and a horrible idea for a few different reasons. First of all, by the time I had gotten dressed and ready to go, most of the streets had emptied, so it was pretty much just me walking around out of place while tourists took pictures from their cars. Then there was the fact that I couldn't really go too far to explore in less comfortable clothes. But this is why it was a good thing: if I hadn't tried out those shoes the night before, I never would have known how awful they were until the next day, when I would have been stuck with them. I'm sure everyone knows the pain of being stuck in uncomfortable shoes for an extended period of time, so I won't go into it too much, but let me just say that my feet were in agony after walking for 30 minutes or so. I was a bit stubborn about it at first because they had fit perfectly back at the shoe store and were probably just stiff, but I finally cracked down and made myself take them off at the beach. Once I actually examined my toes, I was greeted with the sight of skin rubbed raw by friction, at least three blisters forming on the underside, and one cracked nail bleeding slightly. Yay. Guess it was worse than I had originally thought. So that left me without high heels the day before everything started and all of the stores closed for the night. This caused me a great deal of grief over the next few days, but I'll touch on that more later.

Instead of whining about that, I think I'll get the boring part over with in the first part and tell you guys about the history of the town first. Just to make sure you don't fall asleep, I'll intersperse the narrative with lots of pretty pictures. Agreed?

Okay, so as I mentioned before, the Napier that we know today is actually the second version of the town since the first was destroyed in an earthquake. The official date was February 3rd, 1931 at around 10:47am, and the quake measured 7.8 on the Richter Scale. Roughly 157 people died altogether, but it probably would've been much worse if the HMS Veronica hadn't been docked just offshore. The Navy was able to send immediate relief in the form of young, disciplined men to shift rubble, and the ship was able to contact the outside world and let people in Auckland know about the disaster, since communications were down in the city. To this day, the Navy has a special relationship with Napier, and they always march at the front of town parades.

Before the quake, Napier had been just a sleepy little town next to the ocean that didn't really get a lot of media attention. Most towns back then were crowded and dirty as well with lots of smoke, excess wires hanging across the streets, and streets built more for horses than cars. Napier was no exception. But after the quake, the designers were given an opportunity to improve upon it with a new artistic theme. Since there were so few buildings that actually survived, they decided to redo the whole place in one style: Art Deco, looking forward to the future and was current at the moment rather than looking back at models of the past.

Napier Before the 1931 Quake

A few images of the aftermath

So the basic idea was to think positive and look at the whole thing as a second chance to make their city even better rather than dwell on the tragedy. They decided to do a few revolutionary things right off the bat like burying power and phone lines underground (eliminating all of the wires hanging across streets), widening the streets for cars, keeping all buildings at a two-story limit, and replacing street signs with mosaic plaques in the sidewalks. They also blended the Art Deco style with a few other things going on at the time, like Spanish Mission and classic Maori designs. I thought it was also interesting that they borrowed Egyptian and Mayan art styles as well because King Tut's tomb had just been discovered in 1922, so the whole world was obsessed with that at the time. The basic thing to keep in mind about Art Deco if you have no idea how to identify it (because I certainly didn't) is to think of geometric, angular patterns and shapes. Lots of sunbursts, ziggurats, lightning bolts, and parallel lines. If you need another point of reference, just think of the Daily Planet from Superman. http://images.wikia.com/superman/images/3/31/Daily_Planet.jpg

Some examples. Notice the ziggurat patterns, recessed windows, and skyscraper shapes.

All of this worked particularly well for Napier because it hit right in the middle of the Great Depression, leaving a lot of able-bodied men unemployed. Construction workers flocked from all over to help rebuild because everyone was desperate for work. We did the same thing in the U.S. with lots of bridges and skyscrapers built back then. The result was the whole city completely redone in two years and 140 of those buildings still around today. A few of those original 164 buildings were knocked down a few decades ago because no one really realized how unique Napier was until the 1980s, when some architects visited and told the council how rare it was to find so many preserved Art Deco buildings in one spot. Since then, the city has gone out of its way to preserve its heritage and may even get listed on UNICEF's World Heritage Site list.

And that's basically the story of Napier in a few short paragraphs. I'll leave you guys with a few more pictures of the streets for now and try to get another post out soon. Then I'll actually go into what happened there. Cheers!