The Waihorutiu Stream (or sometimes Wai Horotiu Stream), also called the 'Queen Street River', is a former stream in the downtown region of Auckland City, New Zealand, which has long since been covered over and made to disappear by the increasing urbanisation of the area.
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 canalised 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 into the old sewers under Queen Street to the sea, discharging under the Ferry Building.
In 2011, a local artist proposed that, as part of the Council's city centre masterplan, the stream be uncovered and become a centrepiece of a more people-friendly inner city.[4]
In Maori mythology, the stream is the home of Horotiu, a local Taniwha (roughly speaking, a local nature spirit).[5]