The club, as its name indicated, was to dissolve when Napier's population hit 30,000 – but it continued to around the mid-1970s after the populace had reached that number in the 1960s.
When the Napier Borough Council started producing electricity in 1913, the club offered to pay for lighting part of Marine Parade. It also paid for a children's playground in 1922 next to the Municipal Baths on the Marine Parade foreshore.
Napier pre-1931 had little room to expand, and land reclamation was painstakingly undertaken at various points around the then named Scinde Island (Napier Hill).
Around 1927, the club approached the Napier Borough Council with an idea to reclaim by way of a retaining wall part of the Marine Parade foreshore from the Municipal Baths (where Ocean Spa is now) to opposite Emerson St.
Earlier attempts to create a usable foreshore had failed, and there was also doubt that this would work either.
First, permission had to be received from the governor-general to do this – it was granted in 1928.
When the item of the Thirty Thousand Club retaining wall came up for discussion at a borough council meeting, there were questions about its merits, until mayor John Vigor Brown said, "The council has no liability. If the whole structure is washed into the sea – it does not interest us."
The plan to trap shingle and create a foreshore would work like this. Forty-pound (18kg) iron rails were driven into the shingle beach and spaced four feet (1.2-metres) apart.
These piles would be one foot (300mm) below the level of the parade path. Concrete slabs or timber sheeting were to be bolted on to the piles and the timber sheeting gradually raised to the full height of the piles as the beach behind the retaining wall was filled in by shingle from heavy seas.
When the self-reclamation had been completed, the upper section of sheeting would be removed and replaced with concrete coping securely boned into the upper portion of the iron piles.
The iron rails were to be given a protective coating of asphalt and driven in at an angle to afford as little resistance as possible to the sea.
By the time of the 1931 earthquake it could be seen from photographs this process had been successful.
After the quake, Commissioner John Barton, appointed for two years to run Napier's local government affairs, favoured developing this site.
With the expertise of Charles Corner, the borough council superintendent of reserves, and assisted by honorary architects to the Napier Reconstruction Committee, Louis Hay and Stanley Natusch, the plan called for quake debris to be dumped to build up the land some more, then covered with clay and black soil on which lawns and gardens were developed.
This area extends from the Tom Parker Fountain to the Sundial, and forms part of the area for next Sunday's Tremains Art Deco Festival Gatsby Picnic event.
• Michael Fowler (mfhistory@gmail.com) is an EIT accounting lecturer, and in his spare time a recorder of Hawke's Bay's history. He will speak at 10am, Friday, February 16, at the Century Theatre, MTG, on "Post 1931 Marine Parade: The beginning of Napier's Playground 1929-1939". This is part of Tremains Art Deco Festival. Free entry or gold coin donation.
