Daily Photo: Ornate red lamp posts along Quay Street
When you wander down Quay Street on a damp afternoon, camera in hand, it is easy to forget that the solid ground beneath your feet was once nothing more than seawater and mud.
Back in 1840, when Governor William Hobson chose Commercial Bay as the newborn capital, ships simply dropped anchor in the shallows and unloaded cargo directly onto the tide-flats. By the 1850s, a timber wharf stretched out into the harbor, beginning decades of ambitious reclamation that eventually buried old storehouses and grounded ships right where lower Queen Street stands today.
The grand red cast-iron posts lined along the waterfront that are still visible were shipped over from Glasgow in the early 1920s. Beyond their ornate maritime carvings, they served a delightfully practical double purpose providing light for harbor traffic and disguised sewer vents designed to siphon sewer gases high above the pedestrian promenade. When the Harbour Board advertised for gatekeepers to manage the posts in 1926, 1,400 hopefuls applied for twelve positions making it one of the most fiercely contested jobs in the city during the 1920s!
