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It hasn't been as treated kindly as historic buildings sometimes are, but neither has it suffered the fate of most of Auckland's landmarks, never being demolished to make way for motorways or carparks.
Perhaps its grimy history - as a refuse incinerator, rubbish truck depot, an open-air morgue
during the influenza epidemic era and a crematorium - has somehow saved it from the wrecker's gaze.
But Victoria Park Market has been unloved for a long time.
It enjoyed a brief heyday in the mid-1980s when its marketplace filled with shoppers and tourists looking for Bob Marley t-shirts and ice-creams.
It's been a sure and steady decline since, with a variety of plans and schemes floated to re-invigorate the site.
Now David Henderson and his Kitchener Group are putting more than $200 million on the line to transform Victoria Park Market into an attractive and exciting new shopping area.
Henderson lays out his vision for the area to the Herald on Sunday, speaking from the penthouse suite of the Princes Wharf apartment and Hilton Development. That was another bold and risky development which transformed a once functional yet rundown part of commercial infrastructure into a glamorous destination.
But this project, Victoria Park Market, is even trickier than Princes Wharf says Henderson, since it's an attempt to forge an economically successful business within constraints imposed by planners and heritage experts.
The irony of the city council imposing heritage requirements on a site it once owned is far from lost on Henderson. "It's a unique site - ironically it was owned by the Auckland City Council, built by the Auckland City Council and the reason it's probably in such a derelict condition is that it wasn't properly maintained by the Auckland City Council.
"Yet on the other hand, their expectations from the private sector to provide a historic site that is in good condition are quite unbelievable."
And tenants in the market over the past 20 years have not been as constrained by heritage concerns when it comes to making alterations either.
"During the earlier times of the Victoria Park Market, there were some structures that were created.
"McDonald's were in probably the most important building that is in Victoria Park - the old destructor building - and that has been completely bastardised," he says. "Now any chance of putting it back the way it was is impossible."
There will always be some form of conflict between developers and council, says Henderson, but Victoria Park Market, while historically important, is no museum. "It has to attract people, it has to be commercially viable. If you're in the private sector, you can't rely on ratepayers' money to sit on things forever and a day."
He cites the eyesore of the council-owned historic kindergarten building that sits just across the road from the market - a boarded up, graffiti stained structure - as "a crying shame".
"That could actually add a huge amenity to Victoria Park itself, but because it's owned by the council..."
Initial development plans for the site have changed since Kitchener bought the site from the St Laurence Group for $14.1 million back in 2004.
"We firstly looked at having it more like a village. The kind of concept was a cross between what Parnell used to be in the 70s and 80s and the Chancery [a CBD retail development] but that type of development we believe is quite limited and already pretty much catered for.
"It's our intention to intensify the market from our original scheme. Another thing we've discovered - it rains a lot in Auckland. Usually outdoor areas are fine about three days a year, but the rest of the time, you need shelter."
There is a good base of young, relatively well-off people in the market's neighbouring suburbs - Freemans Bay, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, St Mary's Bay and Herne Bay,
"It's a very valuable sector in terms of the disposable dollar goes."
Henderson is picking the development of a new restaurant sector in Drake St as one of its most successful elements. "We're going to create a different kind of restaurant sector - varied, smaller bars, which can also be incorporated during the day time as lunch time venues for the market."
Capturing Henderson's vision for what the market will look like is not easy - it's about smaller shops, with a younger feel, somewhere between a mall and an inner city street.
He uses Auckland city's High St fashion zone as a reference point.
"But if you take High St, a lot of it is quite 'grungy', we're really targeting the younger market. We're not after the Remuera sort of place, or to compete with Newmarket, nor are we trying to make it like a Westfield mall."
While its early life as a rubbish incinerator, rubbish truck depot and stables doesn't appear to lend itself to an easy transformation into modern retail area, some of Henderson's alterations will actually take it back to its more industrial roots.
Holes have been punched in the brickwork on the northern side of the market for shop doors and window - openings into what was once a solid brick wall. These will be re-bricked, leaving just two of the original entrance ways to the site and just two old office windows.
The existing, modern carpark building on the eastern side of the site will be demolished, with a carpark put underground and an apartment block built on top.
Henderson also owns a site across the road, where a Kathmandu store now sits. He plans to build another apartment building here.
Asked about how the Victoria Park Market project is tougher than previous jobs, Henderson has the city council firmly in his sights.
"You are basically dealing with a council that's quite anti-development. You're also dealing with a whole range of communal issues that you've somehow got to suffice within reason, everyone's point of view. Let's face it, as much as Victoria Park is a wonderful example of brickwork, it was a rubbish dump.
"And it's pretty bad isn't it, when we've got a city where we've mowed over just about every old building and the focus is now on a rubbish dump, and I have to protect it."
He says there's "massive" interest from potential tenants in the project and he hopes to have an "agreed concept" with the Auckland City Council within the next month.
"At the end of the day, you've $200 odd million development is purely at my risk. No one's going to pat you on the back if it fails.
He hopes that most of the market will be complete by next summer, with the adjacent apartment buildings under construction. The vision is to keep the market partly open during construction, but this could be complicated by health and safety issues.
Public safety was never much of a concern when the building was built of course. First intended as a way to burn most of the growing city's rubbish, it later had an electricity generator attached to the furnace, providing some of the first power for Auckland.
The 38-metre high Victoria Park chimney was the "Sky Tower of its day" says Ian Grant, Auckland City Council's heritage specialist and senior architect and planner.
He says the council does appreciate the need for projects such as this to be economically viable. "It comes down to not only an aesthetic and philosophical approach, but it's also an economic approach.
"We have to weigh all these different things and come up with something that protects that heritage, not only in the individual fabric of the individual buildings, but also the site as a whole."
At the same time it has to allow development potential, so the Kitchener Group can make some money out of it. "Otherwise what has happened in the past 20 years will continue to happen and nobody does any maintenance and it continues to run down," says Grant.
"There's always this very difficult balance between how far things go - of course the accountants want to push us in one direction and the heritage advocates want to push in a different direction, and council has to somehow steer it down a middle path.
"To be honest, no one gets everything that they want."
That celebrity walk of fame is staying - it sits on top of the original ramp that horses walked up into the upstairs part of the stable building.
And this happens to be the only two-storey stable building in New Zealand. Typically Auckland, this can reasonably be seen as our nation's first multi-storey carpark structure.
The hard negotiations are now under way about how much floor area will be allowed for the market and what kind of changes can be made to existing buildings on the site.
"We get caught between heritage advocates who want us to protect absolutely everything and hardline developers who want to make every last buck," says Grant.
