With its sexy status now being used to promote its restaurants, what does that mean for the industry that made Karangahape Rd famous? Photo / The Spinoff
Originally published by The Spinoff.
For decades there have been cries that Karangahape Rd is turning into Ponsonby. Does this gentrification mean sex work, once a defining industry of the area and now marketing fodder for its restaurant month, has been pushed out?
A suite of slick photographs appeared on poster boards around Auckland city in recent weeks: a black leather gimp mask with spaghetti coming out of it, a cocktail balanced on the sole of an upturned pleaser stiletto, a dinner plate held between two fishnet-stocking-clad thighs. “EAT IT” they proclaimed in a bold font.
The posters were inviting people out to dinner on Karangahape Rd, part of a marketing campaign for the area’s inaugural restaurant month, July, which used its infamous reputation as a red-light district to advertise a different offering - one of the culinary variety. At the same time, K Rd is changing quickly - so is its sex appeal just marketing fodder for gentrifying forces these days?
“Hell no,” exclaims Annah Pickering, the regional co-ordinator for the Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers Collective (NZPC). “Sex workers will always work where our clients are,” she says, adding that the area’s reputation has long been a marketing tool for the industry so that clients know where to go.
That’s not to say K Rd isn’t changing – but it has always been changing. For much of the 20th century it was Auckland’s main shopping street. Pickering remembers a few decades ago, she would hop on the bus with her mum to go shopping on K Rd, or to visit the Methodist church on Pitt St. Back then, George Court was The George Court & Sons Department Store, “a place like Smith & Caughey’s”, and in those days, “nothing was open on the weekend”.
In 1988 the department store closed, but something better came: the Vegas Girl. Once an advertisement for Las Vegas Striptease and Bar, she is said to be a tribute to one of the first strippers in New Zealand to have breast implants. Naked but for her thigh-high stockings, the Vegas Girl is still sprawling over shop awnings, even though her club - which opened in 1962, one of the first on K Rd - has been gone for almost a decade (it closed in September 2015). Now the space behind her flat wooden body is simply the Las Vegas Bar, which sometimes hosts burlesque or Men of Steel shows and at other times is just a bar with luscious red velvet curtains.
That year, 1988 was also when the NZPC set up its first premises after meeting on street corners, bars and beaches for a year or so. The first Auckland base for the organisation was on Symonds St, which joins Karangahape Rd, and shared with the ADIO Trust, an HIV/Aids prevention organisation. At the time, Pickering remembers the area around K Rd being “the corporate part of the country”. There was the Telecom tower, just behind where Tesla is today, which had “masses of staff”. The area was “busy humming, and there was always money”.
Under the Vegas Girl’s perky, full breasts, much has changed. First the strip clubs came, as did the adult toy shops in the 90s. Then they left: there’s only one left of each on K Rd. There aren’t many businesses that have lasted since the 80s, says Pickering: it’s probably only the hair braiding shop at 290b Karangahape Rd, Lambs Pharmacy & Natural Therapies Centre at number 173, and Albert, the watchmaker in St Kevins Arcade.
Historically, K Rd was split at the Newton Rd overpass, an informal but violently enforced division between the east, for cisgender streetwalkers, and the west, for transgender ones. Now bike lanes are slotted between the footpath and road for much of it, and streetwalkers instead discreetly use side streets (transgender on some, cisgender on others).
It was cheap rent, thanks to the motorway taking over Newton Gully, that drew the sex industry to K Rd in the early 80s, and of course there’s been gentrification since. Parts of the road have been branded as “Ponsonby Ridge” by developers. Art galleries, boutique clothing shops, Tesla, luxe hairdressers and trendy hospitality ventures have opened.
In a partially underground space on Cross St, the side street tucked behind Karangahape Rd, a little golden cross hangs from Carlo Noel Buenaventura’s ear. He’s the chef and co-owner of Bar Magda, and sees himself not just as an immigrant to New Zealand (he’s from the Philippines) but also to K Rd. “We’re basically coming into their [sex workers’] circle,” he says. It’s somewhere they’ve chosen to set up shop, not in spite of other industries here, but perhaps because of them, and Buenaventura hopes the coexistence can benefit everyone.
Restaurants and sex workers are not so different, he says, each providing “a different type of hospitality”.
People who come to Bar Magda often comment that they’ve been here before, under slightly different circumstances. In previous iterations of the space, there weren’t tables and chairs and shining cutlery, but instead a line of jacuzzis on the left, or strobes and disco lights. For a while, this was Lily’s, a swingers’ bar, and for another while, it was Staircase, a gay nightclub. Traces remain: the exposed brick wall is glittery, there are way too many water pipes for regular use, and there’s still a black-tiled shower room with a dimming light. Buenaventura has found it’s perfect for storing wine.
For restaurant month, eateries devised dishes and cocktails that paid tribute to K Rd’s sexual history. Pink pussy cat cocktails; decadent, possibly aphrodisiac dinners; and greasy food for the morning after. But it’s not only this month that they pay tribute to sex work - Bar Magda’s name is a reference to Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who was the first person to see Jesus after the resurrection, according to the Bible.
Pickering is not entirely sold by the idea that the pleasures of food and sex are so closely related, but she’s pleased to see restaurants celebrating the sex work around K Rd. In the 24 years she’s been part of the NZPC, the biggest obstacle she’s seen sex workers face is stigma and discrimination - middle New Zealand’s perception that sex work is a seedy underbelly or undesirable. On Karangahape Rd, it’s just part and parcel. “K Rd is not Remuera. It’s not Devonport or Christchurch. K Rd is unique and progressive - and that’s why it’s such an important area,” Pickering says. “It’s about the history of people who have lived or died on this street. People who fought for homosexual law reform, my people who fought for decriminalisation.”
That history is cared for in archives that the NZPC holds - stored away in shelves and cabinets, but also on display, Blu-Tacked to the magenta and yellow interior walls of the Auckland NZPC community base just off K Rd, A placard, white with black, blocky text, leans against a concrete pillar proclaiming “Prostitutes are part of every community”. The base, where Pickering works, is just 100m from the building site that will soon be the City Rail Link’s Karanga-a-Hape Station. Inside there are plenty of comfortable places to sit – secondhand, mismatching couches form conversational clusters throughout the space - and in a nook at the back, clothing, including big bejewelled bras, floaty robes and printed fitness tights - hangs from two racks. But, from the outside, it’s pretty non-descript, the windows and glass doors covered with vinyl frosting.
Pickering loves the Vegas Girl because she visibly marks the sexual history of K Rd. “It’s really important that our history is still here, present, and people don’t try to clean it up or make it something it’s not,” she says. Visibility is important because as an oft-marginalised and stigmatised industry, “we want to be out, we want to be loud, we want to be proud”, she says. Sexy posters for restaurants can help to normalise sex work, but she’d like to see more permanent and meaningful recognition of the area’s sex workers - ideally a mural, like the trompe-l’oeil on Wellington’s Marion St that pictures a street walker leaning against a wall - or better still, statues on the street. After having spent much of her life around K Rd, Pickering says people express surprise to her that she’s still in the same location. “But there’s no other place I want to be,” she says. “I mean, you walk down Queen St - it’s horrible.”
If you need a break from the slopes or don’t fancy a ski, there’s still a lot to do this.