Traffic noise was down, bird warbles were louder. Joggers and walkers dodged kids careening around the blocks on bikes. For those children, could it be the start of a life-long special interest in two wheels rather than four?
It was possible to glimpse a healthier and more home-centred future.
Auckland has made great strides in recent years in increasing the area given to walk and cycleways, but could the coronavirus pandemic mean a wider reimagining of how we live?
Cars are the easy option for getting from A to B. They are the past of city planning and how we have preferred to travel.
However, the pandemic has put a huge question mark over the health safety of public transport with passengers in closed, confined spaces. Officials and experts have cited the impossibility of ensuring distancing on crowded public transport, which will clearly need new safety innovations.
City authorities around the world, who don't want car-use boosted, believe walking and cycling can take some of the load.
The temporary absence of vehicles during lockdown highlighted how they dominate the road space instead of sharing it more with pedestrians and bus and cycle lanes.
Overseas, there has been an immediate uptick in the pedestrian and bike revolution.
At the weekend, London mayor Sadiq Khan announced that some main streets in the city will be limited to buses, walkers and cyclists. Cars and trucks may be kept away from Waterloo Bridge and London Bridge.
It is a smart way of addressing both the emergency and longer term issues - such as climate change, pollution, health, security threats - at the same time.
"By ensuring our city's recovery is green, we will also tackle our toxic air, which is vital to make sure we don't replace one public health crisis with another," Khan said.
Previously, authorities in Berlin set up temporary lanes to meet demand for safe cycling. Bogota, Budapest and Vancouver have also set aside more road space for cyclists during the outbreak. Melbourne plans to create 12km of temporary bike lanes.
Milan has ambitious plans to rework 35km of streets to enable cycling and walking. Paris has set aside hundreds of millions in euros for a cycle network while New York, Seattle and other US cities have schemes to widen footpaths and close streets to cars.
Former professional cyclist Stephen Hodge told the ABC it is a "perfect storm of opportunity" to reshape Australian cities. "There is an enormous tsunami of problems coming out of Covid to rebuild our economy, to reboot, to recover."
Protection measures introduced for Covid-19 could also be vital against future virus shocks.
In the workplace, this will likely mean a rethink of office decor and greater reliance on working from home. And cafes and restaurants will need more space for outdoor seating. They could benefit from an upgrade of some suburban street areas.
Where there are clusters of small businesses such as restaurants, cafes, wine shops, takeaways, dairies and small groceries, pedestrianised areas could dominate. Cars can be diverted around the immediate area or markedly slowed down so that walkers and cyclists have priority.
As more people work from home, and get household items delivered, daily wanders through their local area will become their new normal.
Such areas could resemble the mini villages they briefly seemed under lockdown.
