Waihorotiu Stream

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The Waihorutiu Stream or Wai Horotiu Stream, also called the 'Queen Street River', is a former stream in the downtown region of Auckland City, New Zealand, which has been covered over and made to disappear by the increasing urbanisation of the area.

[edit] History

Originally, it was an open stream starting out in a gully (now Myers Park) before flowing through a swampy area (now Aotea Square) and then down the centre of what was to become Queen Street. Children used the tidal creek to fish for eels, and it provided drinking water for both Maori villages and the first European colonists of Auckland.^[1]^[2]

With increasing settlement in Auckland, much of which relocated to the stream after a fire in the Shortland Street area,^[2] it became little more than an open sewer before being first canalized and then bricked over around the middle of the 19th century by a city engineer, Mr Ligar, after the 'Ligar Canal' threatened to collapse from the flows^[3]. Because of its unsanitary conditions, it had been called "an abomination, a pestiferous ditch, and the receptacle of every imaginable filth".^[2]

Water percolating through the soil under Myers Park still runs under Queen Street to the sea, discharging under the Ferry Building.

[edit] References

^ Britomart location and heritage - Britomart Project History, Auckland City website
^ ^a ^b ^c Ligar canal long forgotten - Auckland's City Scene magazine, Sunday 25 June 2006, originally from the New Zealand Herald, approximately 1870)
^ Auckland WaterPark - Bradbury, Matthew; abstract, The Landscape Architect, IFLA Conference Papers, May 2006