The Sportsman's Home and Cottage of Content
Victoria Street West, looking south from Hobson Street
1860s (unknown photographer) - 2024
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1860s image: Auckland Museum | composite of PH-ALB-94-p33-1 and PH-ALB-299-p30-2
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Hobson Street, east side, looking south from Victoria Street West
1860s (unknown photographer) - 2024
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1860s image: Auckland Museum | composite of PH-ALB-94-p6-3 and PH-ALB-299-p35-1
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Like many other photographs of the city made in the 1850s and '60s, it seems difficult to believe that the modern views are of the same place, so utterly has it changed. The Sportsman's Home hotel was on the south-eastern corner of Hobson and Victoria Streets; the Cottage of Content hotel was close by, on Victoria Street. Federal Street (then Chapel Street) is at far left in the image pair at top. The roof of the old St Matthew's church near the corner of Wellesley Street is just visible at far right in the old Hobson Street image (above).
The historical images are both composites, with roughly equal contributions from each of two prints as noted in the acknowledgements, made in the hope of increasing the images' signal-to-noise ratio.
Below: although taken from rather different positions, when the two 1860s pictures are slightly cropped and presented side-by-side, a slight effort of imagination yields a panoramic effect. Click on the image for a larger version.
Below: a panorama of the scene in 2024 (click for a larger version).
The Elephant in the Room
Below: So far only partly seen, looming over the modern scene is Auckland's Sky Tower (built between 1994 and 1997). From this viewpoint at the Victoria and Hobson Streets intersection it is a neck-craning effort to take in its entire height. A very far cry from the Cottage of Content hotel on whose site, more or less, it stands.
Below: Something of the flavour of 1860s Auckland comes across in these two advertisements mentioning these establishments from Auckland newspapers of the period.
Daily Southern Cross 17 September 1866, page 8
Daily Southern Cross 27 October 1868, page 2
Below: A photograph from 1928 showing the buildings on this block that came after the timber affairs of the 1860s, and which in their turn would be swept away for the construction of the current Sky City complex.
1928 image: James Richardson | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections
Below: a picture of mine from 1974 at the corner of Victoria Street and Federal Street affording another glimpse of the old pre-Sky Tower buidings.
