Two members of a volunteer artillery unit | Customs Street East
late 1890s(?) (unknown photographer) – 2024
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1890s image: unknown photographer | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1269-10290
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A delightful early example of street photography, preserved in the form of a lantern slide. Auckland Libraries point out that: "A note appended to this collection of glass plates indicates this may be the work of Herbert Robert Arthur, 1867-1942."
This spot outside the old Thames Hotel in Customs Street East seems to have been the place to go for a shoe-shine in this part of town in the years around the turn of the century. Below, a detail from a Henry Winkelmann picture of Customs Street made 1903. The bootblack is sitting on a folding seat; perhaps the very one seen at lower right in the main photograph above. The advertisement in the hotel's windows appear to be the same as the one seen in the shoe shining image.
Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W1043 (detail)
Below, a detail from a Muir & Moodie picture of Customs Street made around 1905. (Click here to see the uncropped image in a then-and-now treatment.)
Custom Street (sic), Auckland. Dunedin, by Muir & Moodie studio. Te Papa C.010860 (detail)
Below, another example in this detail from a 1907 Henry Winkelmann image.
Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0882 (detail)
Below: and again, in another 1907 Henry Winkelmann picture.
Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0945 (detail)
Lastly, a crop from another Henry Winkelmann image, this time from 1908.
Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W1015 (detail)
Dating the historical photograph
A search of the National Library's Papers Past site for Campbell and Ehrenfried's Exhibition Beer, advertised in the Thames Hotel's window, yielded numerous newspaper ads for this beverage, the first in December 1898 and the last in June 1899. However, as noted above, the advertisement for it in the hotel window seems still to have been there in 1903, so—in the absence of other evidence—the picture may either be from the late '90s, or the early 1900s.
