KEY POINTS:
With summer holidaymakers in Auckland, the city's sorrier sights can be more than usually embarrassing. None is sorrier than the old working wharves in front of the central business district.
Nearly six months ago the central business organisation, Heart of the City, called on citizens to protest against Ports of Auckland's plans to release Queens Wharf in three years but keep Captain Cook for unloaded cars and remove the small Marsden Wharf to make more space for container ships.
A greatly enlarged reclamation, filling the area around all the container wharves and extending further into the harbour, has surprisingly attracted less opposition. The guardians of the maritime environment, the Auckland Regional Council, also own the port's commercial operation and perhaps sanction further encroachment on the Waitemata in return for public use of the "finger" wharves.
Queens Wharf would be a real prize. The iron shed that dominates the seaward end of it at present ranks with the city's worst eyesore. The ARC aimed to buy the wharf from its port company and have it in public use by the time of the 2011 Rugby World Cup. It should keep to that target, and should already be offering some ideas to transform it into an amenity that will complement the Ferry Building and new terminals nearby.
The council's waterfront redesign resources are absorbed instead on the larger Wynyard Quarter project west of the Viaduct which will eventually remove the tank farm. But that project is heavily dependent on commercial and residential developments that might struggle to get off the ground until the apartment market recovers.
It would seem better in the meantime to get on with Queens Wharf and press the case for Captain Cook too. Open and functioning for people and pleasure craft, they would vastly improve the city's outlook.
