History

108 lots consisting of 36¼ acre sections on Meeanee Spit, 58¼ acre sections on Scinde Island and over the harbour 14 suburban sections of 13 to 39 acres.

Wellington merchants and speculators were among the buyers.

Napier gained some new settlers when a number of soldiers took their discharge in Hawke's Bay.

In 1874 with the arrival of new immigrants came animals, birds and fish introduced to improve the province's pastoral production and revive sporting pleasures known in Britain.

Tolls levied to repay the costs of construction and maintenance were withdrawn in 1875 due to the popularity of the road.

The road also began the reclamation of the area known as Napier South when it formed an embankment.

Flood washed away the railway embankment at Waitangi, undermining Ngarururo Bridge.

• Quarantine Building on Park Island
• The Post and Telegraph Office in Browning Street
• The lighthouse which stood on a small plateau to the south of the gaol
• Courthouse
• Slaughterhouse at Awatoto.

• Anglicans added a new aisle to their pro-cathedral
• St Mary's Roman Catholic church on Shakespeare Road had been replaced by a new building higher up on Convent Hill.
• St Mary's at Meeanee was lengthened by 18 feet with a wing of the same size on each side
• The Wesleyan Methodists began to built a church (destroyed by a storm a year later) in Clive Square.

• Horace Ford left the Masonic Hotel in March 1874 to build the Criterion.
• Ellis, Ford's successor at the Masonic rebuilt the Masonic so as not to be outshone by the Criterion.
• In July 1874 the new Royal Hotel was opened in Carlyle Street.
• South of Napier, the Shamrock Hotel at Awatoto offered its guests plunge or shower baths supplied by artesian water and hot salt-water baths.
• A Maori hotel was opened at Karaitiana's Pakowhai pa.

The provincial government called tenders for a line of immigration cottages in Thackeray Street.

A well with an estimated supply of 150,000 gallons per day was sunk in Raffles Street towards the end of 1875.

The borough council was criticized for its unwillingness to contribute to the building fund in contrast to the Hawke's Bay County Council which had given £500 as well as £250 for maintenance. In May the borough council granted £100 to the fund.

The buildings completed in 1880 consisted of three wards, doctor's quarters, kitchen, quarters for matron and nurses, secretary's office, vestibule and small dispensary, with small convalescent courtyard and verandahs in the centre of the block.

1900

A stopbank was built along the borough boundary of Wellesley Road and a channel constructed to take in water from the Tutaekuri River.  To the south a weir was erected near the Taradale Road bridge.  Work was delayed due to a run of dry seasons but the natural flow of the river did not prevent silt from settling in the channel and a dredge was used to keep the channel clear and to spread silt over adjoining land.  When the land had been covered by silt contractors levelled it and laid out roads which were raised from 18 inches to 3 feet above those of other flat areas in Napier (Munroe, Dickens, Thackeray and Carlyle Streets).

These loans together with other money raised through rates, mortgages and bank overdrafts financed additional sewerage works which served Napier until the end of the decade.

By June 1909 the loan had risen to £134,250 with £25,000 for a new municipal theatre and £9,250 for parks, boundary roads and a new fire station.

In March 1910 the State Advances Department offered Napier a loan of £35,000 for sewerage works.

The Council borrowed part of its loan money from the State Advances Department and the remainder from the AMP Society.

The new district provided Napier with two important parks - Nelson Park (20 acres) which the borough council purchased from the syndicate in 1909, and McLean Park (10 acres) which was donated by RDD McLean in memory of his father.

Refuse not suitable for disposal by drainage was collected and taken to the refuse-destructor on the old Recreation Ground.

Before construction began, a petition, signed by residents of Hastings Street, the Marine Parade and adjacent roads, asked for the extension of the tramway to the borough boundary via Hastings Street.  This extension, debated by councillors for nearly a decade, finally won approval in May 1919 and opened in 1921.  The line did not go beyond the railway crossing in Hastings Street.

With a loan of £5,000 raised in 1910-11 and a further £1,631 from the borough general account the council purchased Nelson Park and began to develop it.

The club raised money for numerous projects including Marine Parade lights and tree-planting along Kennedy Road and its most spectacular entertainment was the Mardi Gras festivals with the first one being held in 1913.

On 8 September the opening ceremony was held (the tramway had cost £60,000).

The trams showed a modest profit until the 1920s when, in addition to the unsuccessful Hastings Street extension, they suffered from private motor-bus competition.

In the period from 1 April 1915 to 31 March 1916 the power station generated 977,413 units for 765 consumers and in 1923-24 the figures had risen to 2,400,000 units for 2,600 customers.

A petition was put forward by 46 Napier South ratepayers in January 1914 which was approved at a poll held in March 1915. 

Following official amalgamation three loans were approved in 1916 providing drainage (£14,600), sewer connections (£7,900) and water supply (£14,000).

The prince's visit also aided the beautification of Clive Square with the addition of palms, tress and shrubs of a sub-tropical nature.

When the Aard Bus Company did want to sell its buses on the Ahuriri run the Council only bought one of them and was the only local authority in NZ which did not operate an auxiliary motor bus service with its tramways.  Refusal to operate bus services allowed it to phase itself out of the municipal transport business after the tramways closed in 1931.

Water - As an emergency measure, 400-gallon tanks, mounted on lorries, were filled from the artesian wells at McLean Park.  The lorries maintained a supply of water to barrels and tanks at various prominent places were householders collected it in jugs, buckets and other containers.  This service remained in place while artesian wells and pipelines at McLean Park, together with the pump house in Dalton Street and the reservoir in Thompson Road were repaired.

Sewerage - Prior to the earthquake Napier had depended upon a system of centrifugal pumps or pneumatic ejectors to raise the sewage from the flat areas of Napier to the outlet tanks.  These ceased to work when the electricity supply was cut off and the sewers which had run from south to north were flattened or lowered by the uplift of land in the opposite direction.  At Napier South, sewers were blocked when river silt was forced through cracks in their pipe joints.  On the hills, damage was less severe but all pipes needed repairs.  After inspections it was decided to abandon nearly all sewers in the central business district and the flat areas.  Some were converted to stormwater drains.  The same general design was used for the new sewers, however, they were laid under footpaths instead of under the centre of roads.  In addition, some pumping stations were re-sited and some ejector stations replaced by pumping stations.

Electricity - After inspection on 4 February it was found that the main feeders, erected with steel poles and towers, had suffered very little damage.  On the evening of 4 February Napier received power from Mangahao and on the following morning sewerage pumps were working again.  The steel transmission towers from Waikaremoana to Napier also avoided serious harm and after two towers, damaged by slips, had been repaired Napier received power, at 11,000 volts, from Waikaremoana on the weekend of 7-8 February.  The power board resupplied diary farms and hospitals and county councils in the Wellington area sent portable lighting sets for temporary hospitals at Hastings and the Napier Park racecourse.

The Relief Committee's money came from a fund of £387,000 (£400,000 with interest), the result of a nation-wide appeal on behalf of the Hawke's Bay Earthquake Relief.  3,229 houses were repaired or rebuilt at a total cost of £127,000.

Three weeks after the earthquake the Government gave a loan of £10,000 for the erection of temporary business premises in Clive Square (32 shops) and Memorial Square (22 shops).  Occupants were selected by ballot and "Tin Town" (nicknamed because of the wooden frames and corrugated iron roofs) opened on 16 March.  Nearby on the corner of Munroe and Dickens Streets a temporary office block for the Associated Banks (New Zealand, Union, Australasia, National, Commercial and New South Wales) was erected being the first temporary building to appear after the earthquake.

On March 11, the council's functions and duties were delegated to a Government Commission of two men - John S Barton (a magistrate) and Lachlan B Campbell (inspecting engineer to the Public Works Department).  The commission's powers were confirmed by the Hawke's Bay Earthquake Act, although the borough council continued to exist as a legal body.

£1,500,000 was granted to the province (£1,250,000 reserved for private relief and £250,000 for local bodies).

Requests for loans far exceeded the money available and so the Rehabilitation Committee placed restrictions on all funds.  All national or international firms were required to finance their own reconstruction and all firms unable to prove their solvency on the day of the earthquake were debarred from assistance.  When the committee distributed funds it made some gifts but preferred to retain control through loans which were issued on the security of mortgages and first debentures over the entire property of the recipient leaving no security for the purchase of stock.

With the aid of the committee's advice, the commissioners adopted pre-earthquake plans for the widening of Tennyson and Dickens Streets, together with service lanes connecting Emerson Street with Tennyson and Dickens Streets (service lanes provided off-street loading zones).  Water mains were laid underneath the lanes to provide another point of supply against fires.  All power and telephone cables were laid underneath the footpaths.

In August 1931 tenders were called for the Market Reserve Building approved by ratepayers in 1930 and the building was completed in June 1932.

At Clive Square, palms were replanted and limestone rocks used as protection borders for flower beds.  When the band rotunda was donated to Westshore a goldfish-lily pond was built in its place.

South of the Sound Shell an outer sea wall was built faced with concrete and a promenade built above this wall to protect the recreation area where a putting green, basketball courts, tennis courts and a Mardi Gras area were laid out.

Nelson and McLean Parks were carefully drained and re-sown and returned to their pre-1931 quality.

At Port Ahuriri, the borough council began to reclaim the South Pond area (approx. 20 acres) in return for the transfer of 9½ acres as a recreation reserve to the council.  By May 1945 the council had prepared enough ground for one football field.

Besides the new land in Napier South, a block of 367 acres, situated between the embankment and the present day Hyderbad Road-Pandora Road highway to Westshore, was reserved for future industrial development.

The Government began negotiations for the purchase of 195 acres between Latham Street and the Napier Boys' High School.

The Roman Catholic Church purchased a site in Riverbend Road for a school (St Patrick's Boys' College) and land was set aside for a primary school (Onekawa 6 acres), parks and recreation grounds (25 acres).  In later years, two more schools, Colenso High School and Wycliffe Intermediate School, were founded in the area.

A self-contained community of 44 flats on a site in Riverbend Road was planned by the Napier Town Planner in conjunction with the NZ Institute of Architects when a gift of £20,000 was received for pensioner housing along with £20,000 from the Council and a government subsidy of £40,000.  This number grew to 80 by 1962.

24 flats were built in Morris Spence Avenue for pensioners after another bequest of £75,000 was left to the Napier and District Masonic Trust for charitable purposes.

Afterwards the city council accepted the ministry's proposal to develop the block in stages and under this agreement the council was to pay two-sevenths of servicing costs and the ministry the rest.  This lowered the council's costs to £150 per section, compared with £400 for Onekawa and £300 for Westshore's roading and kerbing.

Along Georges Drive the council's reserve staff cleared the old riverbed, levelled and grassed its banks and trees and shrubs were planted along the strip (30 acres in area and 2 miles in length).

In 1960 the council raised a loan of $180,000 for the widening of Dalton Street and the purchase of the Civic Centre site and to finance construction the council raised a further loan of $560,000 followed by a supplementary loan of $56,000.