Chaffer’s Park Campaign—Newsletters

Newsletter 4 - October 16, 1997

Dear Supporter,

We haven't won the battle for Chaffers Park yet.

Nearly half the council still want to see Chaffers used for residential and commercial development.

Another group of councillors are unsure and may swing either way.

The council will make a final decision on December 17.

It's more vital than ever to:

1. Let the council know you support a park on the whole Chaffers site.
2. Give them your views on the plan produced by the Design Team. Is it a well designed park? Does it meet your needs, and the needs of the city as you see them?

Thank you to all who made A Great Day at Chaffers Park such a fantastic success. This is now the best supported campaign in the city's history. Let's keep it up.

Mary Varnham

The Design Team Reports...

Support us by attending this final public forum - wear your badge!

Monday, October 20. 7PM, llott Concert Chamber

At least two CHAFFERS options will be presented:

• A 100% park
• A smaller park surrounded by residential & commercial buildings

Come and see the latest plans. This may be your last chance to have a say.

Unbelievably, the City Council has said it is not going to consult the public further on waterfront development!

Great Ideas Unlimited

We have received hundreds of ideas for Chaffers Park from people all over the city and passed them to the Design Team.

As we told the Community Consultative Committee:

Chaffers Park- will be a huge success if it meets the clearly expressed needs of Wellingtonians. It is the one place on the waterfront where large, soft, green areas can be provided, allowing for a large range of informal activities and softening the much-remarked-upon 'harsh edges' of the wharffront... As well as providing structured areas such as a skate park and specialist gardens, much of it should be a 'wild place' where both children and adults can engage in creative, informal activity, such as was in evidence at A Great Day at Chaffers Park. This is the essential nature of a metropolitan park.

Most frequent ideas:

• Large, safe children's play area
• Large grass outdoor concert and event area
• Outdoor theatre, stage, soundshell
• Skate park (for skateboarders, stunt-bike riders and in-line rollerbladers)
• Other recreation areas and facilities for young people
• Specialist gardens - such as Chinese, art deco, native plant, sound (wind chimes), Japanese, Zen.
• Landscaping and planting for shelter
• Strong, simple, natural design (no 'fanciful whims' or 'architectural features')

Other great ideas

• Pond for model boats
• Pond for rowboats
• Petanque court
• Maze
• Sculpture
• Outdoor climbing wall
• Waterfall
• Gently sloping paths
• Picnic
• Barbecue area

Things you've said you don't want at Chaffers:

• Apartment buildings or other residential buildings
• Commercial buildings and shops
• Masses of concrete, paving and other hard surfaces (apart from skate park)
• Fastfood outlets, neon signs, through roads

For the full list of suggestions 'Wellingtonians Describe the Chaffers Park They Want', phone or fax 473-7743.

What about the Herd Street Post Office?

Chaffers Park supporters seem evenly split on whether this art deco building should be preserved on site, moved or demolished. The City Council recently decided it should be preserved if possible. If you have a strong view, tell the mayor and council now.

Chaffers Park - Five Things You Can Do To Make It Happen!

1. Come to Monday's public forum and speak up for the 100% park option. Bring friends, family, neighbours, young people, senior citizens. Wear a Chaffers Park badge.
2. Attend council meetings listed below
3. Make submissions to these meetings. (Notify Chris Metcalf by noon the day before: phone 499-4444, fax 801-3020).
4. Phone/fax/write to Mayor Blumsky and councillors.
5. Urge friends and workmates to join Chaffers Park - Make It Happen!

Important Dates

• Mon Oct 20 - 7.00pm, llott Concert Chamber: Public Forum
• Fri Oct 24 - Information pack on waterfront designs available - Contact Rupert Watson, WCC, PO Box 2199, Wgtn; phone 801-4003, tax 801-3010
• Mon Nov 10 - City Council workshop with CCC and Lambton Harbour Management
• Tue Nov 28 - CCC and LHM submit final recommendations to Council.
• Thu Dec 11 - 9.15am, Meeting Room 1: WCC Strategy Committee - Will make recommendation on final designs for public spaces, including Chaffers.
• Wed Dec 17 - 7.30pm, Council Chamber: Council Meeting - Will make decision

An Urgent Message To All Skate Park Supporters...

We have fought for a skate park to be included at Chaffers, but there's no guarantee it will happen. According to a youth rep on the CCC, the Design Team believes skateboarders etc are 'nomadic, and won't use a skate park'. If you support a skate park, write to the mayor and councillors. copy the letter to: Youth Reps, Lambton Harbour Community Consultative Committee, PO Box 9668, Wgtn. They are representing your interests. Phone talkback: Newstalk ZB 4721035. Organise a skate-in at the park - tell chief reporters at the Evening Post, the Dominion and City Voice.

Help - We Are Desperate For Funds

After paying for mail-outs, A Great Day at Chaffers Park expenses etc,we are stonybroke. All our workers including those who organised and performed at the Great Day - are unpaid, but campaigning is very expensive. For example, with around 1500 members, this mail-out alone will cost over $900.

Buy A Chaffers Park - Make It Happen! T-Shirt

These superb white and green t-shirts - featuring 365 Things You Can Do in a Park - will become collectors' items in years to come. (Imagine what an original Central Park souvenir would be worth today!)

Perfect for summer days. Great for Christmas presents. Fabulous for our cash flow.

Special offer: $15 for one, $27.50 for two, $40 for three. (Postage $2.50)

Great badges - only $2.00ea.

Please print out the form below or email us at chaffers@freemail.co.nz us with your order

To:

Chaffers Park Make It Happen!
P O Box 9229,
Wellington

Please send me _____ t-shirts.

Please send me _____ buttons @ $2.00 each. (Postage 50c)

Donation $ ________

Cheque enclosed for $ ________ (include postage)
Please make cheque payable to Chaffers Park Make It Happen!

Name:

Address:

Newsletter 5, November 11, 1997

Dear Supporter,

Three months ago we set out on a journey to save a park.

We believed the Chaffers site - eight acres of public waterfront land between Te Papa and Oriental Bay - was the last chance Wellington would ever have for a large green park in the central city.

Today, we are even more convinced.

There is a dire shortage of people-friendly green space in downtown Wellington. Much has been swallowed up by concrete and paving stones. With more than a thousand new apartments coming on stream every year, many more Wellingtonians using the waterfront for recreation and hundreds of thousands of visitors expected at Te Papa annually, the need is becoming acute.

Despite this, the city council was planning to sell most of Chaffers to property developers.

We felt this would be a tragedy. Once the land was gone, the people of Wellington would never get it back. Our city founders had the foresight to create the Town Belt and Botanical Gardens as oases of peace, beauty and recreation, We urged our council to show the same wisdom and care for future generations by creating a much-needed green city park.

Our campaign touched a nerve with Wellingtonians. A survey showed 84 percent wanted the whole Chaffers site as a park, and were opposed to any sale or commercial development. A record number of people joined Chaffers Park - Make lt Happen! Five thousand people turned out for A Great Day at Chaffers Park.

However, although the public made their feelings very clear, many councillors continued to support sale of the land for residential and commercial development

The Design Options

The council's waterfront design team was asked to produce a range of options for Chaffers as part of a waterfront plan. These options are described - unfortunately with little detail - in the enclosed leaflet, Only Option One is a full park. The other three have walls of multi-storey buildings along the water's edge, next to Te Papa, along Cable Street and Oriental Parade, or in all these places,

These buildings would range from five to seven storeys - as high as Te Papa - and block virtuaIly all views of the water. Up to 60% of the land would be sold into private hands.

The council will tell you that Options 2, 3, and 4 all provide for a large park. Don't be fooled. The small enclosed spaces in these options would hardly even rate as a park in most world cities. They would in no way meet the needs of Wellington now, let alone in 50 or 100 years' time.

What would be the quality of such a "park"?

• During the day, buildings would shade much of the open space.
• Public parks and private apartments are incompatible, Apartment dwellers would inevitably press for restrictions on public use of the park for music, outdoor concerts, children play, skateboarding and many other activities, lt would become essentialy a private park for the residents.
• The space would be too small and use-restricted for major events. Wellington, "Events City", already misses out on some outdoor events because there is nowhere to hold them. Chaffers, large and close to public transport would be ideal. Only Option One provides this much-needed venue.
• Finally, multi-storey buildings would increase crime in the area. It is a myth that buildings provide protection, in fact they create greater opportunities for crime. Evidence shows that well- designed, popular city parks are much safer places than the streets and buildings around them. Central Park, 830 acres of public land with no buildings, has the lowest crime rate of any police precinct in New York.

"Fifteen to sixteen million people visit the park every year, and it is as safe a place as there is in urban America" -- Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York, June 9, 1996.

"If the argument is that more buildings equals more safety, then that is simply and fundamentally wrong. Constructing buildings where none existed before can onIy result in the Creation of opportunities for vandalism and victimisation. Similarly, if surveillance by the public is the goal, then one can argue that open spaces provide greater opponunities for surveillance than any series of buildings." -- Trevor Bradley, criminologist, Victoria University

Herd Street Post Office

We are concerned that people being surveyed by the Community Consultative Committee are being told a full park requires demolition of the Herd Street, Post Office. This is untrue. The fate of the building is an entirely separate issue, and we have made it a s

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Newsletter 6

The Waterfront: Stop foisting extravagance on us - Just leave it all alone

By Lindis Taylor

Time and again we - and I suspect it's the great majority - have tried to tell the Council and Lambton Harbour Management that we don't want concrete and new buildings all over the waterfront. They go away, re-do the plans, but come back every time with yet more elaborate and extravagant schemes.

If this is what the council spent $400,000 on, it's monstrous, They've clearly had a brief to make those opposed to the big commercial options look like greedy greenies.

I was utterly bemused listening to the presentation last month in the Ilott Concert Chamber, lovely adolescent dreams with a ridiculous price tag.

It's not what we want at all; yet we are being criticised for making unrealistic demands. We want neither commercial development nor fancy, over-designed open space. We are not under any illusion that a shopping list is on offer. We just ask: Leave it alone and do modest bits of greening and tree planting, over many years, as it can be afforded, and of course have an overall plan.

And anyway, who says we're not prepared to pay more rates to secure such an opportunity? But we are angry that we'll pay more rates to meet debts arising from LHM's earlier misguided schemes, that were so widely opposed.

First, it is outrageous that everything in the scheme, apart from Chaffers, is presented as final - no further discussion. For there are monstrous proposals across the entire waterfront that will destroy its character and its public value and which must be stopped. The press has rather played into the hands of LHM by panicking the population with the prospect of a vast deficit unless we accept the maximum commercial option. But we get no details of what the alleged loss-making things are - I suspect they result from deliberately muddled counting.

The one totally unacceptable option is to sell the freehold of a large proportion of the area. The city owns it and the city should keep it, exactly like the Town Belt.

The latest plan is grossly over-elaborate. We want no more than a few minor buildings around Chaffers: forget the mock-historical graving dock and all the trendy structure. Visitors ( if that's our fixation) aren't impressed with gee-gaws designed just for them; it's the old and functioning elements of a city that are interesting.

The no-win alternatives for the Herd Street Post Office offered by the design team are utter barbarism. It must remain, not mutilated; its survival must not be tied to the commercial options.

Herd Street is a 'given': sure you wouldn't put it there if you were doing it today, but leave it alone, soften it with very big trees. Future generations will thank us for a grand example of art deco which will be admired as we now admire Old St Paul's (which a LHM of yesterday tired to destroy).

Leave the Free Ambulance where it is; refurbish Odlins and give it a respectful paint job and it'll look great; leave Shed 22 alone - its lines are very fine and it's the last remaining brick warehouse in that part of the waterfront. These old buildings must remain where they are; they must be made the pivotal elements of whatever limited commercial activities happen there.

It's no to massive buildings that engulf Odlins, that disembowel Shed 22 and block views.

No hotel; no casino (NO CASINO ANYWHERE!); just nothing else.

If the shed on King's Wharf (Shed 13) must be moved, it should not clutter Jervois Quay, further blocking views; perhaps it should go immediately south of Shed 21.

But there are also hideous proposals elsewhere. While attention has been focused on Chaffers, the area north of Queens Wharf has been ignored. That is a tremendously valuable area which must not be built over.

It must be left largely open space (except perhaps the relocated shed 31) for it is the adjacent CBD that is so desperately short of open space now. The designers have offered a lot of cute drawings of continental-looking lanes in that area - Whitmore Lane indeed! Quite high buildings will shade most of the minuscule things they are pleased to call piazzas.

Just leave us with the open space for God's sake.

Every east-west street in the CBD should have an uninterrupted view to the harbour and hills - some of these views have already been lost. Let's regain them. The plans show that views down Ballance, Waring-Taylor, Johnston, Brandon, Panama, will be lost or miserably restricted; the view from Post Office Square through Queen's Wharf is a mess.

LHM have shown a pathetic lack of business acumen so far; if Queens Wharf was still open space, the monstrosities (Events and Retail Centres) that many of us fought against in the late 1980s would not now be costing us millions.

LHM should just try to manage competently, the few old buildings that remain, without messing with them.

Better still, sack LHM.

This is the best chance the city has had in a century to regain space, along with buildings that speak a little of the city's maturity, that will be of far more value to us and our visitors and our descendants than all the fancy tinsel structures we were presented with in the Ilott Concert Chamber the other night. We can't afford it and we didn't ask for it!

Lindsay Shelton (Day) 385 7686 (Night) 384 6034 Home