KEY POINTS:
It's no shoes and instant coffee without milk at Sir Barry Curtis' flat overlooking Eastern Beach in his beloved Manukau. Through an open door I can see the bed is half-made. His undies and black velvety slippers lie on the bathroom floor where he discarded them hours earlier,
probably to do one of the end-to-end radio interviews with which he has been besieged since he announced he was standing down from the mayoralty a couple of days ago.
Standing down does not mean, says Curtis, posing patiently for our photo, he is ready to stop working. He has plans. "I will never hang up my boots."
He is one of the country's longest-serving mayors, with the development of Auckland's fastest-growing region from almost bare farmland to a thriving, multicultural and at times brilliantly designed city to his credit.
Curtis insists, over and over again, that he's a man of the people. He says he designed this region to attract business, provide employment and give working people a decent standard of living. "I'm a working-class person and I don't forget my roots."
He has never been popular with the wealthy eastern part of Manukau. The woman from Howick, taking her regular walk along Bucklands Beach, points out that Curtis has done nothing for her part of town - which subsidises places like Otara - and he is widely disliked.
A rival politician claims Curtis is obsessed with economic prosperity at the expense of dealing with his gang-riddled badlands, despite millions of dollars being poured into the region to help right the problems.
Others point to his homage to the car: his long-time opposition (recently rescinded) to public transport; the endless suburbs that stretch for miles without a village, cafe or shopping centre within walking distance.
Although colleagues say Curtis owns property in some of the choicest parts of New Zealand and is surely a multi-millionaire, he and his partner, Ann, live modestly. The flat is compact, bordering on small. The most flashy things in sight are the big barbecue on the deck and some LLadro ornaments. "I'm more into strategic locations, if you know what I mean, rather than big glossy houses," says Curtis, staring out at his priceless view towards Musick Point.
At 68, Curtis's once-red and famously helmet-cut hair is grey, but his eyebrows and eyelashes are still the pale marmalade of his Irish ancestors, his hands freckled from the fierce New Zealand sun.
"I love the land and I do have this intense passion for Manukau and its people. I eat it, I drink it, I sleep it. And I know it'll be very hard to let go. I fear October 15th, quite frankly."
Given half a chance Curtis will talk for hours about his achievements and the factors that shaped his life. He talks slowly and with the colourful expressions of an Irishman. Many projects are "magnificent" or "fabulous".
When he was invited to stand for the Manukau Council in 1968, he loved getting up in the Kawakawa Bay Hall expounding his views, enjoyed the people - and he bolted in.
By then his beliefs had been firmly hammered into place. His friends at Cornwall Park School turned on him when his waterside worker father went on strike with his mates in 1951, and it bit deeply. "I was only a little boy. That hurt."
At Otahuhu College, just over the fence from King's, he watched the boys who were driven to school in their parents' Mercedes and Jaguars. "I used to feel inferior. I'm a working-class person. I relate to poorer people, I'm not impressed by the affluence of others - which is why I have such a strong belief in social justice."
A hard-won apprenticeship with what was then the Lands and Survey Department took him first to Rotorua and then to Tuhoe country deep in the Ureweras. For the first part he lived in a small hut and later in a Lands and Survey caravan - which explains, he says, why he is happiest living in motel units or small flats.
During those two years he also forged a deep understanding for Maori and their struggles. Curtis, who had to pick up a couple of chainmen every morning, reported to chief Hurawaka for permission to enter Maori land. "A lot of the land had been confiscated in the 1920s. We were putting in survey pegs and the old kuia were coming along behind taking them out."
Although he loved being in the bush, clearing it with just an axe and a slasher, playing hockey in weekends and summer evenings, it was time for another step forward.
In 1967, tragedy struck when his father, "a giant of a man" with an Irish brogue and stories that transfixed all, presumably missed his footing while jumping into a boat from Princes Wharf. "I got a call from my mother. She was perturbed that he hadn't come home. His Austin Mini was parked where he always parked. They didn't find his body for seven days."
His mother was devastated. Six months later, after she was burgled in her Otahuhu home while picking daphne, Curtis, now married and reasonably affluent, "moved her" to Bucklands Beach. He bought her a house across from the beach and later moved next door. When she became frail she moved in with him. "Just before she died she asked me, "Please build a motel on this lovely piece of land"'. He did, weaving around planning bylaws to build the first and only motel on the waterfront - and lived in one of the units for many years. It is now sold.
By 1976, five years after he joined the council, his marriage, which produced three "beautiful, red-headed" daughters, now all grown, was over. His wife is never spoken of but he has been happy with his partner, Ann, for 24 years. He says Ann is "a wonderful woman" and all others who know her say she is lovely, but he insists she does not want to be involved in articles like this.
IN the late 60s Curtis had landed a bursary to the Town Planning School.
He must have impressed someone because soon after he finished his thesis - on volcanic cones - there was a knock at the door. "It was Ted Nelson, the chairman of the Bucklands Beach Ratepayers Association," says Curtis. "He said to me, 'Son, you've just graduated. We want you to stand for the Manukau City Council."'
It was October 1968 - 39 years ago. "I couldn't believe it," says Curtis. "I topped the poll - which I have done in every election since: five times as a councillor, eight as mayor and four on the [then] ARA."
From the beginning Curtis loved being on the council.
"I enjoyed the problem-solving, people ringing me up. Lloyd Elsmore [the mayor] and I set about identifying possible park spaces in this vast tract of farmland. There were no strategic plans, no long-term council-conceived plans."
So the young councillor with town planning expertise started putting together a vision for the city.
"I wanted to create a city with a heart - which was the Manukau City Centre adjacent to the Great South Rd. I wanted to create communities over this 600ha of largely undeveloped farmland which ran from Kawakawa Bay to the Panmure Bridge, right up to the little bridge over the estuary at Otara and to Weymouth in Manurewa. [And] also how people were going to move around that city."
Until he became mayor Curtis also worked with associate architect Neil Simmons and surveyor Danny Hrstich. Together they developed schemes for councils including One Tree Hill where they outmanoeuvred developers trying for end-on-end car yards.
They also put together the Bucklands Beach motel, the general store and post shop at Tryphena on Great Barrier, an enlightened beach settlement at Matarangi in Coromandel, and the Kuaotunu Dairy down the road, at the foot of the Blackjack Hill.
"He's a pretty bright sort of cookie, really," says Simmons who admits he doesn't agree with all of Curtis's ideas. "I'm the arty one. Councils should be doing a lot more creative planning - and this obsession with cars is really crazy. What's he doing about the railways?"
Simmons says his former associate is a hard businessman. "He's astute, knows what to invest in. And he pulls rank on you a bit."
Curtis relied on his training and architectural magazines rather than travelling overseas for inspiration. "We put in decent infrastructure - good roads with curbing and channelling, good water supplies."
He is against big tin shed development, "horrified at what's happened on George Bolt Drive on the city side of the airport where towering warehouses butt against the road with no setback strips".
He claims the land had been bought by a developer in the 60s and it is impossible to backtrack. "We must never, ever, make that mistake again."
"I'm not a proponent of user-pays philosophy and also a firm believer in public ownership of regional infrastructure assets. [I] won't abide anybody who wants to sell those airport shares."
And regrets? The fact that he and John Banks never managed to push through the Eastern Transit Corridor. The corridor, planned to run alongside the coast from Pakuranga to the city, brought down Banks and doubtless had much to do with Curtis' disastrously reduced majority in the last elections. But, as he says, the Manukau side of the project is still steaming ahead.
Today, the self-confessed workaholic hopes a new challenge will open up for him.
He doesn't want to retire - or the fancy, formal farewells, "I'd rather just fade away." What he does want is something to do.
Although he will not talk about his would-be successors, earlier in the interview he did say he was shocked that people could just walk in off the street and become mayor, which would lead us to think he favours his long-time councillor and ally, Len Brown.
Many of his ideas now seem old-fashioned, according to his critics. Curtis shrugs off comments about his council's horrifying youth violence problems and inability to glue its communities together as "500 young people who have been causing grief, tarnishing the image of Manukau. It's a handful, it's most undeserved and I don't like it!"
Perhaps, alongside his admirable drive for social justice there's just a slight gleam of malice towards the affluent classes that comes from those early days when he was made to feel inferior.
As he says, "There are no snobs in our family."
Curtis lists his triumphs
* Most important, his fight to keep Manukau intact against massive pressure from the gentlefolk of Howick to carve the affluent eastern suburbs away from Otara, Papatoetoe, and so on. "There was huge pressure on me to break the city up. I resisted that, which was a major achievement."
* Linking Howick to the Manukau City Centre.
* Using his planning expertise to lay the city's foundations, including two of the country's largest employment centres, at East Tamaki and Wiri, and the foresight to plan the development zone around the airport - so the run up to the airport from the Manukau end is park-like, giving visitors the impression of a green and pleasant land.
* Creating the country's largest multicultural city: 48,000 Maori and 60,000 Pacific islanders and carrying that on to "development relationships" with the Cook Islands, Samoa and soon, Tahiti.
* The Southwestern Motorway and rail link, which are both locked in.
* The new town of Flat Bush designed with "green spokes" to encourage people to walk over rather than drive (and a similar project planned for Bucklands Beach).
* And most recently, the Council's acquisition of the Pukaki lagoon in Mangere, an explosive crater of enormous historical and ecological value to local Maori.
