Daily Photo – Where Queen Street Meets Customs Street

The rain did little to improve the mood, although it did give Queen Street a certain atmosphere, with umbrellas moving along the footpaths and lights reflecting off the wet road. The old buildings still stood proudly among the newer towers, their ornate facades in contrast to the glass and steel that had grown up around them. The comparison was hard to miss. Here was the Auckland of another time, built when a city centre was somewhere people actually came to spend the day, now surrounded by the much taller, shinier version of itself.

Yet there were still signs of life. Vehicles crawled along the sections of Queen Street that were open, people hurried through the rain, and businesses, although open, continued to operate behind the old facades. It wasn’t exactly bustling, but neither was it completely dead. Perhaps this was simply what Auckland’s city centre had become: a place where the past was still standing, the future was already here, and everyone else had either found somewhere else to go or was waiting for a reason to return.