Effect of 1931 Earthquake on Hastings CBD – Graham Linwood

Jim Newbigin: We’ve got a talk tonight at Landmark[s] by Graham Linwood.

Introduction: Welcome to our first meeting for 2020. 2020 is the twentieth anniversary of Landmarks, so it’s quite a memorable year for us; so it’s been our pleasure to have Graham Linwood accept an invitation to come and speak to us tonight. Graham’s been an architect around here for a long time – I think it was 1977 you opened your business – and [in] 2004 he was part of a panel which talked about architecture in this area. He’s also [cough] fought very hard with others to keep alive the John Scott building in Lake Waikaremoana. So apart from heritage buildings, there are precious things in our area that he is concerned with. We’re very delighted to have you, Graham, and we look forward to your talk about the effect that the earthquake had on our CBD. Enjoy. [Applause]

Graham Linwood: Right – when I was asked if I would speak, I sort of was a wee bit hesitant about talking about Art Deco, ’cause Art Deco in itself has been fairly well spoken of, and there are people who know a hang of a lot more about it than me; and books have been written, and so I sort of looked at another angle that we could take to make it interesting, and also sort of broaden the knowledge bank as such. So we looked at what the impact of the earthquake actually has been on Hastings; and of course it’s the same around the rest of Hawke’s Bay, but people often refer to the earthquake as the Napier earthquake, but that’s quite erroneous; it was the Hawke’s Bay earthquake. More people died in Napier than they did in Hastings, but mostly that was as a result of the fires that took place after the earthquake. Their gas mains went up, and they didn’t have a water system that was sufficient to effectively fight the fires, so as a result Napier lost more lives and more buildings, which is quite sad.

Quite a few of the prominent Hastings buildings were severely damaged or lost, and most of them were of brick construction. Some of them were light timber frame; and you’ll see as we go through that the ones that were constructed more solidly of reinforced concrete came through a hang of a lot better than the stacked together masonry buildings. [Showing slides of various Hastings buildings] That was the Grand Hotel, and you can see the before and after there. And I must acknowledge that I found these in the website in [of] The Knowledge Bank, so thank you to them.

This was one of the significant losses in the earthquake – the old Post Office, and the tower that came down into Russell Street, and the clock – I think you can see it there in the rubble. That was salvaged, and formed the bells in the current clock tower in town. But you can see there the nature of the construction; you know, there was little in the way of reinforcement that was holding things together.

This is looking down Heretaunga Street, and that’s Roach’s Building there; but you can see there on the left hand image the building on the corner there which was the Roach’s Building. And a lot of the lives that were lost in the earthquake were lost in there. People got trapped when the building came down – you can see on the right the after image. The damage was pretty extensive, and the rest of the street suffered quite badly as well.

And that’s Heretaunga Street – you can see Westerman’s Building there, the ‘WE’; and you know, that got quite badly knocked around, as again did the other buildings. The ones coming back towards the corner of Russell Street and Heretaunga Street – what the photo doesn’t show is that there is a building there on the corner, the R & R Building, that actually stood up quite well, and we’ll talk about that one a wee bit later on.

Queen Street, looking back up towards Russell Street and the clock tower on the corner; you can see quite a few of the buildings there suffered quite badly, and again, they were the light masonry buildings without much in the way of reinforcement.

Cosy Theatre – now that really suffered, and a lot of that was timber frame, brickwork; you can see the corners of the building on the left hand image … the brickwork coming round the corner, and it just had no way of resisting the earthquake … the strength of it.

And this is the little Methodist church opposite the Opera House, and that took a real hiding. There’s a lot of other images of that same era, and the damage in Hastings; there’s actually quite a good record of those in The Knowledge Bank, just in the website.

Going to buildings that have been built after the earthquake, or came through the earthquake – this is a little house which was originally the Carlson Flats, and I think Craig Morgan will remember this one quite well too; from the mid-eighties when we started to do some quite major work to convert it into commercial premises. Each of the entrances you can see on the Warren Street frontage took you on the ground floor to two flats, and on the first floor to two flats, so the work we did was actually converting those into initially an accountant’s office, and then we worked on the left hand end of it to convert that into office premises as well. And it’s a little building that’s really quite lovely; it’s got an Art Deco feature to it, and it’s actually functioned very well as a commercial office, having been residential. But it was built in 1933; and yeah, it was the mid-eighties that we started working on it.

Public Trust Building – that was built in 1926 at a price of $10,925 [£10,925] and a lot of that information comes from the Heritage Inventory, from this set of books here, which was a combined effort of the … Landmarks were involved; City Marketing; Hastings District and Heritage New Zealand; they all contributed to a heritage architect actually doing an inventory of the significant heritage buildings in Hastings, and it’s a brilliant resource. And there’s a lot of information there; I think there’s a hundred and nine or something buildings that were considered in the report. It was designed by a Wellington architect, Stanley Fearn, and the builders were JWC Munn from Hastings, and you can see the nature of the building – it’s a Stripped Classical piece of architecture. Unfortunately for anyone with an interest in it, it has just been sold. It was for sale when I took the photo about a fortnight ago.

This is a series of buildings: the Rainbow and Hobbs Building; that one was actually built … the initial part on the right hand side of it, the two-thirds of it to the right … they were built in round about – bit contentious, but they seem to think it might’ve been 1897 or some time around there – but the right hand third of the building was built after the earthquake. There was a small parcel of land between that and the next building you can see with the ‘WW’, and the owners of the Rainbow Hobbs building purchased that, and added in the same form as the original building. And you can see up the top the little motifs in the facade there, aren’t repeated on the other side. So the extension was done in 1935 by Davies Phillips, who were a well-known firm of architects in Hastings; did a tremendous amount of work.

And round about the same time they were involved with the next building in that group, which was the Scannell Building; and the frontage to that got a fair knocking around in the earthquake. And that is actually basically a brick building; and they put the new front on it and they did it in the Stripped Classical design which was fairly popular at the time.

The next building along was the Dominion Building, and that was actually in three titles; and they built the building in the same form over the lot. The architect to that’s unknown, but it was built around 1908, and built using reinforced concrete. And the original owners were the Russell family; Sir Andrew Russell was the guy who led the armed brigade in the First World War.

Commercial Bank of Australia is the one on the corner in Queen Street, [cough] and again that was a Davies … it was Davies, Garnett & Phillips at the time that was done, because Garnett had joined them, but only for a short time. And that was a Stripped Classical building again, using reinforced concrete.

The one next to it was the Queen’s Chambers, and again by Davies, Garnett & Chaplin, 1932. They were built using reinforced concrete, so they’re still here today.

Now this is the Post Office that was built after the earthquake when the old one came down; and it was 1932, again, in Stripped Classical design … architectural style. And it was designed by T J Mair [J T Mair] who was the government architect at the time, and was built by a company by the name of H W Abbott of Hastings; $12,022 [£12,022] was the accepted tender price, and it seems fairly difficult to comprehend that our dollar has slipped to that extent over that time. But I’d hate to think what it’d be worth to build now. The original building that we saw in the earlier image was built in 1910, and as I say, the bell tower was actually re-used.

Now this is an interesting building [Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Co-operative Association Building] inasmuch that [as] it was designed by Edward [Edmund] Anscombe in 1929, and again it’s architecture’s Stripped Classical. But he’d come across this system of construction using a floating foundation, which meant that when there was an earthquake it could move like that [demonstrates] and it wasn’t locked in; and started to topple at the top. And the story goes that he was so confident of the construction of the building – his offices were actually in the top floor of the building – and he’d taken his cup of tea up to his office and he wasn’t going anywhere ‘cause his building was going to stay there, and it wasn’t going to fall down. And he was dead right – there was only superficial damage to the building. And it was one of the first buildings in Hastings that had a lift in it, and the lift is still there and you can … well, the last time I saw it you could tell that it was dated back to then; it was wrought iron and you know, quite smart.

One of the gems: Westerman’s Building. You can see the damage that was done to the Westerman’s building in the earthquake. And this was a building that was again an Edmund Anscombe, and it’s of Spanish Mission architecture, 1932. The cost of building that was $4,300; [£4,300] builders by the name of Trevor Brothers. Round the ground floor in the retail area there was a tremendous amount of leadlight, a lot of which has been retrieved and is still in the building; and that was done by a T J Clark. Obviously leadlighting was very popular in that era, and it would be quite difficult to replicate than now. Could be done; I think Craig Morgan would tell us that some of it was actually done with timber and painted to replicate … would that be right, Craig?

Craig: Yep.

Graham: Mmm. They did a very good job of it.

The next little building along is the Harvey’s Building, which was built as a general hardware store by the Harvey family; they’d owned the land and rebuilt after the earthquake, and Garnett was the architect for that. Its construction was concrete columns and beads, and the front wall and the back wall were poured concrete; but the infill panels were brickwork just set into the concrete columns and beads. That is one of the problems that we’ll talk about a wee bit when we’ve finished going through this. The building has been since 1993 owned by a trust, and it’s the home of the Hastings Community Arts Centre; and I’m sure that most of you have been into the building. It’s got a lovely atrium space around the first floor, so it’s ideal for displaying artworks. It’s been restored, and I think the trust bought it in ‘93, and I think we’ve probably spent three times the cost of purchase in actually doing the building up and getting it into an order that we’re happy with. But unfortunately, the builders that we originally used decided to retire, so Craig, we can’t forgive you for that. [Chuckles] The centre of the Harvey’s Building is a big leadlight glass with a skylight up through the roof, and there was one similar in the Bon Marche Building, and they are really quite a feature. But they need work; and in the Harvey’s Building it had to be taken out and restored. The one in the Bon Marche Building was in much better condition, thankfully.

Now the three buildings that we’re looking at there are the R & R Building, Webbers’ Building, and Poppelwell’s Building as it became known – it wasn’t actually built for the Poppelwell family, but we’ll come to that. Now these buildings were all built using reinforced concrete, and they range from 1927 to … well, no, the Poppelwell Building was originally built for Fitzpatrick & Co in 1924, using reinforced concrete; the Webber’s Building was built in 1928; and the R & R Building was built in 1927, so not that long before the earthquake. And the corner one is a mixture of Art Deco – you can see the Art Deco features in the corner and the top and the Stripped Classical around the windows. The Webber’s Building is more of a Stripped Classical design, and the Poppelwell, or Fitzpatrick Building is a combination of Spanish Mission and Stripped Classical.

So you can see we haven’t focused on Art Deco buildings specifically in what we’ve been talking about, but those three buildings suffered … I wouldn’t say minor damage, because the Webber Building had a fire that took quite a bit of the interior out of it at the time and had to go through quite a bit of reconstruction internally; but it was standing; it was able to be reoccupied within a reasonable time – testament to the reinforced concrete construction.

The Poppelwell Building had a number of different occupiers, [occupants] but the Poppelwells moved into it in 1930. It was the earlier home of New Zealand Aerial Mapping; they occupied quite a bit of the first floor, and they were there until 1956 when they moved to their purpose-built premises in Warren Street and Avenue Road.

One of the things that has happened … well, hasn’t happened just recently … but in the Building Act the Councils are required to identify buildings that they consider are potentially earthquake-prone, and notify the owners, who have then a certain amount of time in which they can have a report prepared and then go back to the Council and sort of debate how long they’ve got to actually bring the building up to a reasonable level, and the ratings are given. And there’s a National Building Standard, so a building that’s right up to standard would be a hundred percent, and a building that’s unsafe to be occupied is deemed to be below thirty-three percent. And in between there’s a range of levels that … they’re not exactly arbitrary, because often it’s the insurance companies that’ll dictate what level of NBS they’re wanting before they’ll offer a reasonable level of insurance. As an example of that, with the Harvey’s Building we had ongoing insurance at a pretty good sort of a rate; it was costing us $8-10,000 a year, and when the NBS applied as far as the insurance goes, it was costing us $26,000 for the insurance, which was pretty untenable. So we had to actually spend a few years with reduced cover, and run the risk that if the building did collapse in an earthquake or a major fire or some event, that we wouldn’t be able to rebuild it in that form. Since we’ve undertaken the earthquake strengthening and got it back to a level that’s in excess of seventy percent, we’ve been able to get the insurance back; but not back to the original low level, but at least we can afford to pay the insurance.

And that’s one of the things that … a lot of buildings aren’t occupied in town, because a lot of the major companies won’t allow their staff into a building that has an earthquake rating that’s below whatever level they set as being their criteria. If your building doesn’t have an earthquake rating and has never been assessed, obviously it’s going to be a hard job to get a tenant for it. But if it’s got a good rating it’s more likely to attract a good tenant; and obviously a whole lot of other factors come into it as well, but that’s affecting the ability of people to get their buildings occupied, aside from the fact that a lot of businesses aren’t interested in occupying a first floor in Hawke’s Bay, and there’s a hang of a lot of first floor premises that are vacant.

We have a number of factors in Hastings that affect the earthquake strength of the buildings. One of them is our poor ground conditions; you know, we consider that Hastings is you know, built on old riverbeds, and they’ll be good and they’ll be sound and they’ll be everything we want but they’re not. Effectively there’s a fair bit of swamp around and we don’t have good ground conditions, so when the earthquake strengthening’s taking place that’s one of the first things that has to be considered, is actually how you overcome that issue in itself.

And then you’ve got to overcome any other deficiencies in the building; and certainly if they’re brick infill panel, you’ve then got to stabilise the brick to stop it falling out and crashing on people. When the Council did their initial survey work, one of the first things they had to look at was the buildings in the centre of town that could be a problem if a parapet fell down, ’cause that was one of the big problems in Christchurch; how a lot of the people there were actually killed was with parapets falling in onto the street. So they’ve had to go and notify all the people who own buildings within effectively the old ring road area, and make sure that they start to put some thought or action into getting their buildings surveyed, and then doing something about restraining, firstly the pieces of the parapets and such that might fall over; and then the buildings themselves.

So it’s become a bit of a can of worms in that regard, and a huge cost to a lot of people who own those buildings. At the end of the day we’ll hopefully have a town that’s got a lot of buildings that are safe to occupy all round.

Right; I think I’ve probably said enough, and exhausted what I was going to say, anyway, so …

Moderator: Would you take some questions?

Graham: Oh, yep.

[Question asked, inaudible] asking Graham if he thinks that the earthquake requirements [are] over the top.

Graham: One of the problems that we have is that the earthquake science is quite undefined, and you’ll ask one engineer what the solution is to fixing a building or even providing analysis of what the NBC [NBS] rating is, and you’ll get a totally different story if you then go and ask another engineer. So the lack of consistency … and excuse any engineers who’re in the room at the moment … but the inconsistency in that is one big frustration as far as we’re concerned. And it does make it difficult when you go into a building and the engineer you’re working with says, “You’ve got to do this, this, this and this”; and he says, “But our neighbours didn’t have to”, which is sometimes quite right. And there may be engineering reasons why that’s the case, or it may be that it’s just different engineering philosophy. And of course the engineers have a professional responsibility to do what is deemed to be right, and they have to be able to justify their existence. So my own personal opinion is … sometimes you do question it.

Question: The photograph that you’ve got there of Poppelwells – you were saying that it was reinforced concrete which was pre ‘31 … pre-earthquake … what led the building trade into reinforced concrete? Was it earthquake risk, or was it just a new building trend?

Graham: There was a fairly known thought of earthquake issues prior to the Napier earthquake – there’d been earthquakes in New Zealand previous to … sorry, the Hawke’s Bay earthquake [chuckles] … there’d been, you know, some quite significant earthquakes, and the science of earthquake design had become you know, quite well understood. So a lot of those buildings that were built, you know, a few years before the ‘31 earthquake were actually built of reinforced concrete because it became known that, you know, the masonry buildings didn’t take the earthquake loadings.

Question: You spoke about the floating foundations – what’s the principle on how they work, ‘cause I believe the Tomoana Freezing Works was the same …

Graham: There’s been quite a few buildings around the country that’ve been constructed on floating foundations, and Bowen House in Wellington was one of the other earlier ones, and … no, sorry, that was redone using base isolation foundations; but the floating foundations actually give a level of separation between the load-bearing foundation and the structure of the building, so that the two can act a wee bit independently even though it’s a heavy reinforced concrete construction. But what it’s led to now is the base isolation, with the lead or the rubber pads that they lock into the foundations and allow the building to actually move at its own rate and come back to where it started off; which is pretty much what happens with timber-framed housing, and that’s why the timber-framed houses weren’t knocked around to the extent that the masonry heavier constructed buildings in the centre of town were.

Question: From time to time we hear something about, ‘Well it was the wrong sort of earthquake’ – do you think we know all the kinds of earthquakes that are likely to happen?

Graham: I can’t say that I’m an expert on that, but what I do know is that there are some that have a vertical impact, and some that have a horizontal impact. So what I do know is that the engineers focus on those aspects when they’re designing a building. The Hawke’s Bay earthquake in Hastings was known because it actually rolled, and the ground was … you know, was heaving quite considerably, so it was a pretty … pretty good shake.

Question: Graham, you were going to expand on the Harvey Building; you said something about the colours and the brickwork. Can you expand on that?

Graham: Oh yes, I have to a degree; the infill brickwork into the columns and beams were usually just tied in with wire, and that was all that was restraining them. And in an earthquake they have a tendency of pulling out or falling in, so there’s a risk that, you know, people can get badly injured by that happening. And there’s a number of ways that you can address that, and with the Harvey’s Building, what happened was that we created a timber frame inside the brickwork and pinned steel pins in two directions in both of those stud frames at quite close centres, and then locked them in with nuts after they were [?cube set?] in … glued in place. So that timber frame then acted as the buffer to hold the brickwork. The other thing we did on the back wall where we couldn’t do that, was we used a fibreglass mesh system which was embedded into plaster that was keyed into the brickwork; so we put pins into the brickwork, cemented those in, and then put the fibreglass over that and then locked the whole thing together with the pins and the fibreglass. Quite an expensive exercise, but sometimes you just have to do that.

Question: How was the Hawke’s Bay Opera House strengthened? There’s a lot of bricks in there – how did they tie them in?

Graham: [Showing slide] The two buildings there were Municipal buildings. Yeah, well that was 1916-’17, the Municipal buildings on the corner. And that’s wrapped at the moment, because it’s having earthquake strengthening work happening, and the Opera House again is having its second round of earthquake strengthening. Don’t ask me exactly why, it’s a wee bit of a mystery. The Municipal Theatre – now known as the Opera House – that was done; and there’s a lot of brick in there and I’m not sure how much of that was actually restrained in the first round. Craig, do you recall that?

Craig Morgan: It was restrained with a walkway being built on the outside, down the alleyway. The other side, the Plaza side, didn’t have any particular work done to it at all. So there were very limited funds at that stage, because it was all being done by donation, so you know, it was a kind of a ‘pick as you go’, and decide what could be done.

Graham: Thank you. I haven’t actually been into the area that’s being reconstructed now, to actually see what has been done and how they’re doing it, so I …

Moderator: Well in just two and a half weeks, 29th February, you can go and see for yourselves. What was [the] scene as far as architectural firms before and after the earthquake? It seems like there were some government and put-of-town big-name architects; what was happening locally?

Graham: There were a number of smaller firms that were in Hastings at the time, and they’d done some of the work that we’ve talked about, the Davies Phillips, the Garnetts, Edgecumbe. [Anscombe] And they stayed on, and some of them were actually in Hastings in the fifties and later, in different forms. And there were a lot of other architects from outside the district that came in and worked in Hastings. Obviously there wasn’t the capacity to do all of the work with the staffing that was here prior to the earthquake, so there was a bit of manpowering to help in that. They formed a group, as they did in Napier, and that group allocated the work, and got on and made sure it was done. So there was a bit of organisation involved in it.

Question: Yeah, Graham, it may be irrelevant perhaps, but a similar foundation to Christchurch; I’ve never read anything about liquefaction in Hastings. Are you aware if it was a problem here?

Graham: It’s actually become a major problem, not just in the centre of town but in the whole of the Heretaunga Plains, especially the urban areas. It’s been graphed off as being ‘High’ and ‘Very High’, and of course, ‘Low’, and no liquefaction at all. But you’ve got to get out quite a way before you’re out into the area where there’s no impact of liquefaction, and in some places, you know, you’ve got to go down a long way to get a good bearing for your foundations, and it can become quite an expensive exercise. So a lot of the housing now is built on pod foundations that will actually float rather than bearing down in it, but they’ve often got to have a consolidated shingle raft built underneath them, so it’s a science in itself.

Question: Graham, is there any concern about the amount of artesian water that’s being pumped out and bottled and sold overseas and elsewhere? That that might affect the ground conditions, and the support that the buildings will get?

Graham: It’s always there as a thought, Craig, but I don’t think there’s been any real study put into that. Obviously they’re looking at the amount of water that is being drawn off out of the aquifer for whatever purpose, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re doing this major grid survey of the aquifer at the moment; just to see what is there and what the impacts are of quantities of draw-off. Certainly when you’re building a building of any size and the foundations go down to any great depth, it does become a problem because our water table’s quite high here. There’s been some experience of this in Hastings, and in Napier, where they’ve just had to pump continuously to stop the building getting completely inundated with water. It’s just a result of the water table.

Question: I want to know – would the Dominion Building be the oldest building in Hastings? What do you think? Because we’ve lost two very old buildings in Market Street, and Albert Hotel.

Graham: I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but there’s a building on the corner of Warren Street and Heretaunga Street that is quite an old building, and I’m not sure exactly how old it is. The Dominion Building would be certainly one of the older reinforced concrete buildings in Hastings, and the one on the corner of Heretaunga Street is not reinforced concrete. That’s one of the problems, that some of the buildings are uneconomic to actually bring up to an earthquake standard.

Moderator: Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you’ll join me in thanking Graham for a fascinating talk; what Graham and his professional cronies are doing now will hopefully become heritage buildings in their own right down the track. I would like you to join me in thanking him very much indeed.

[Applause]