This is an essay I wrote for the final Freerange Journal, Freerange 12. Given that it was the 11th (!) anniversary of the September earthquake, I thought it would be apt to share it here. If you enjoy it, there is more information on the journal it comes from - and where you can purchase it - at the bottom.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, a warm blanket that can envelop you in a hazy glow of half-remembered truths and misremembered rumours. It is often tied to certain people and particular places, to circumstances that were brief and fleeting, but manifests in the mind with an unsteady permanence. High school or university are often very important times, as we break away from our parents and make new bonds of friendship, some of which last a lifetime, while others loosen, those friends eventually becoming unnamed faces in fading photographs. The backdrops for these memories are as important as the people – the film sets that stage the action as we re-watch the pivotal scenes over and over in our minds. They could be classrooms, student flats, a favourite coffee shop, a particular corner where you all met after school. Many of these places won’t last much longer than the events they host, especially with the high turnover in music venues, cafes, art galleries, bars and other businesses – built as much on the community as any long-term business plan. You might find yourself walking down a street five or ten years on, recounting the old names of the spaces to the boredom and rolled-eyes of those around you. Everything must end, but what happens when it all ends at the same time?
The earthquakes that hit Christchurch in 2010 and 2011 were a disaster on a scale that hadn’t been seen in New Zealand since the Napier-Hastings earthquakes in 1931. One hundred and eighty-five people died, the majority of them in the collapse of two major buildings: the CTV and PGC buildings. Thousands of houses were demolished, as were hundreds of commercial buildings in the central business district. The central city was cordoned off for years, and when the fences started to come down, many of the places that had hosted once-in-a-lifetime events were gone. One area that had been of particular importance to me – the south-east of the centre city, around High and Poplar streets – was almost entirely wiped out. In the first half of the twentieth century, this area had been a centre of light manufacturing, especially clothing. As production drifted overseas, the area fell on hard times. Then in the 1990s, and accelerating in the 2000s, the cheap rents and interesting brick buildings became the centre of a minor creative renaissance in the city.
In a textbook example of gentrified urban regeneration, Poplar Lane was buzzing with art galleries, artist studios, band practice spaces, up-and-coming fashion designers, cafes, bars, and probably most importantly, flats. Many of the people who lived here chose to do so because they were part of the community, whether it was working at the pub or studying at the polytech. As the area got more popular, it became a bigger destination. The Twisted Hop – one of the city’s first specialist craft beer breweries – opened in a little square on Poplar Lane. Other spaces came and went. There was a Jewish bakery and a couple of bath houses. A tea house opened and closed, replaced by a bar. A Russian bar opened two doors down from the German bar – though sadly a Polish bar didn’t take the lease in between the two. The area was never static, with empty spaces being used for temporary art exhibitions or gigs, markets in the courtyards – a sense of constant flux. And then it was all over.
A number of places in this area didn’t survive the September 2010 quake. Almost none survived the February 2011 shake and the subsequent wave of demolition. Many – most – of these buildings had been two or three storey, constructed from brick, unreinforced and underinsured. There was the added misfortune that one property developer owned a large proportion of the buildings, and their insurer, Western Pacific Insurance, didn’t have adequate reinsurance to cover the claims made against them. The out-of-pocket developers were in no position to attempt to salvage and repair these buildings, and they were soon not much more than rubble under the caterpillar tracks. Today, the area is a mixture of showy glass facades and empty lots covered by cars and gravel. One of the few buildings to survive the cull is at Smash Palace, a bar on High Street, run by Johnny Moore and family.
Johnny Moore has a long history in the area and we can follow the evolution of the area through the bars that he has run. His first venture was Cartel, a very small bar on the lane in the area that would become SOL Square. As one of the first establishments to open in the lane, it developed as almost an outsider space, both part of the action and too cool for it at the same time. It became the destination of choice for the locals of the area and had a community feel that was rare or absent in other venues that opened after it. Local musicians were always there, either playing music or talking about playing music, and it was a frequent destination once the free wine had run out at any of the nearby art gallery openings. As the rest of SOL Square opened, the area became increasingly popular. As with gentrification the world over, the artists, musicians, poets and weirdos at Cartel had made it the place to be, but as the number of patrons at the upmarket booze-barns in the rest of the lane increased, the outsiders looked to move on. Johnny Moore had them covered.
Over in Poplar Lane, there was a tea house that had wildly overestimated how popular tea would be. Moore and his family took the lease and started planning for their next venture, Goodbye Blue Monday. This was a much larger venue, with an indoor area that could accommodate a stage for bands. There was a large outdoor area, covered by a canopy, that was perfect for those who liked to smoke whilst huddled around fires in 44-gallon drums. The outdoor area was littered with rumpty couches and chairs from second-hand stores, giving it the feel of a flat that had been partied in a few too many times. As with Cartel, it became the epicentre of an alternative subculture in the city, with artists and musicians sharing $3 cask wines alongside politicians and priests and whoever else needed a quick taste of realness. Unlike Cartel, Moore didn’t get to end Goodbye Blue Monday on his terms; the earthquake did it for him.
The way people remember the two venues provides some insight into how and why nostalgia can be so powerful. Though the quake technically ended both of them, the loss of Goodbye Blue Monday (or GBM as it was affectionately abbreviated by most of the regulars) was more extensively mourned. Cartel had continued on after Moore and co left; it was the same space physically, but not emotionally. Many of the regulars had followed Moore across to GBM, and thus had parted company with Cartel years before the quake. With Goodbye Blue Monday, and many of the other venues in Poplar Street, as well as across the city, there was no chance to say goodbye. There was no closing down sale or final spectacular. You couldn’t go back in two months, when it was now a fried chicken joint, and point out to your bored girlfriend where you once had an argument about the best Strokes LP. The quakes violently ripped so many of these cultural and emotional spaces from us. Without a physical space, it was harder to find a closure.
These are examples that are very specific to my experience, which might only be shared by a few hundred others. But all across Christchurch, there will be similar examples, novellas of friendship and love and rivalry and dance competitions and footsie and bad customer service and flickering fluorescent lights and smells that just won’t go away and longing and they all just ended abruptly, the final chapters torn from the book without even a hint of resolution. Those memories are wandering around in limbo, waiting for their story to be told, knowing it will never be resolved.
Of course, places to meet up and get a little tipsy might not seem that important in the bigger scale of a massive natural disaster – and they aren’t. They pale in comparison to the day-to-day issues many people faced for years and, in some cases, are still dealing with. But for most people, social activities are one of the main attractions for living in cities. They are the colour, the glue that stick us to a place. Christchurch lost a lot of glue in the quakes, and we’re still a long way from having enough to stick things back together.
Rather than give up, Johnny Moore continued to stick at it. In the years following the quakes, there were a number of sites that were activated by temporary projects. Some of these were fleeting, lasting a day or a week or a month. Others moved into an insecure ‘temporary permanence’, and Smash Palace is one of these. This was the next iteration of Moore’s hospitality vision of selling people he liked food and beverages they liked, and it took an unusual form. At the corner of Bealey Ave and Victoria Street, one of the most high-profile locations in the city, he built an enclosure behind the scaffolding that had become so familiar to the rebuild. Inside this yard was a bus, converted into a bar. Patrons could be served from either side of the contraption, and on a leaner with a view out to the road, or in another bus converted for the purpose. It was a very silly, surreal idea that totally summed up the mood of the city in the years after the disaster. But Victoria Street was never the right address for Moore, and so, in 2015, the bus made the trip across the city to their new home in High Street. The second site still has the ramshackle charm of the first, but with a degree more permanence. It is also mere metres away from where Goodbye Blue Monday once stood. It feels much more like home for Moore, his staff, and their patrons alike.
Although nothing is ever permanent – something Moore has learnt while pouring drinks across five sites in not much more than a decade – the current iteration of Smash Palace does feel like an end point. For those of us old enough or lucky enough to have been around in the days of Cartel or GBM, it feels like we’ve been on a journey, and it’s really comforting to be back where it all started. Bars are all about friendship, and the space itself can be as important as the people inside it. Of course, Smash Palace won’t be around forever. If the rebuild ever really kicks on like they’ve been telling us it would for a decade, then it will eventually get swallowed up by the empty glass facades of the Innovation Precinct. Until then, it will continue be the stage for many future nostalgias, a nuclear fission reactor of quirk and grit, lubricated by bodgie beer, the laughter of friendly arguments drowning out the construction sounds of the glacial rebuild. In a city where so many places were taken from us without any warning, it is important to take a moment to respect the ones that we still have.
This is an essay from Freerange 12: Everything Is Temporary. You can purchase the journal here for just $14, or poke around on the website and you’ll be able to find the whole issue as a free PDF to download.