Cuban revolution: Cuba St

Sunday Star Times | Friday, 21 September 2007

Grant Smithies reveals his love affair with Cuba, the street.

Is it just me, or are most of our urban centres as boring as batshit?

Our inner cities have more cafes and bars than ever, but less personality. Our meeting places are meticulously designed, beautifully lit, carefully decorated, but feel emptier.

Throw a stone on Auckland's Viaduct and you hit a high-end eatery with an astounding wine list, but their ground concrete and stainless steel interiors are curiously devoid of soul.

Gimme some dirt, some character, some individuality! Throw in a few winos, junkies, punks and nutters for local colour, and you have a neighbourhood that's as messy and unpredictable as life itself. In Auckland, you have K' Rd. In Melbourne, you have Fitzroy. In Sydney, it's Newtown. And in Wellington, you have Cuba St.

Packed with agreeable grimy old Edwardian and Italianate buildings and, until recently, resolutely low-rise, Cuba St was named after the New Zealand Company ship, Cuba, which arrived in 1840, carrying some of Wellington's first settlers.

It is my favourite street in the country. It feels like home to me, or perhaps a well-worn old armchair. I've been flopping myself down in Cuba St for over 30 years now, and it has always adjusted itself to my changing shape. When I was young, skinny and broke in the late-70s, I drank cheap beer, chased expensive women and watched punk bands here. Now that I am middle-aged, tubby and decently paid, I eat great tucker here, drink decent wine, buy clothes and books and indulge numerous other grown-up predilections.

I have squandered my rent money on rare soul and jazz LPs in Slow Boat Records, which has been here for 21 years, and where Jeremy and Steve can be relied upon for dubious musical recommendations and wit as dry as desert sand.

I have had my aesthetic sensibilities rewired by the art in Peter McLeavey's gallery, which opened 39 years ago and has since hosted everyone from Colin McCahon to Yvonne Todd in the same pair of peaceful white rooms at 147 Cuba St.

I have stood on the pavement outside Sanjay's Cuba St Fruit Mart, clearing my head of exhaust fumes with the crisp, fresh smell of apples, mangos, coriander and celery that has been wafting from this same doorway, seven days a week, for the past 40 years.

And most of all, if I'm honest, I have gotten drunk here. The street is more densely studded with great bars than any other street in the country. Favourites? Warm as the womb and dim as a cave, The Havana Bar is a tiny cottage-turned-rum bar down a little alley called Wigan St (left off Cuba on to Abel Smith St, then left again). The Good Luck Bar (downstairs at 126 Cuba) is a narrow basement club with Cambodian food, kick-arse cocktails and so much black-lacquered wood you feel like you've stumbled into an opium den.

The proudly kitsch Mighty Mighty bar (upstairs at 104 Cuba) is a long wooden room painted a poisonous Granny Smith green, with gold tablecloths, ancient armchairs, beer by the jug, and a teensy stage where a band might rattle your fillings with surf rock.

But the imbiber's motherlode is surely the Matterhorn (106 Cuba). Founded in 1963 by Swiss immigrants and taken over by the current owners 10 years ago, The "Ho" has won the best bar in New Zealand and best drinks selection awards at the NZ Bar Awards for the past two years, and was included in US magazine Bartender's 20 best bars in the world. Why? Great decor, superb live music, and switched-on staff. Wander off the street with a powerful thirst and an obscure cocktail request ("Blood And Sand, thanks") and the bartender will tell you it got its name from a 1922 movie starring Rudolf Valentino while he mixes it for you.

Such arcane knowledge! Such rare devotion! Such blinding hangovers!

Cuba St is a live-and-let-live sort of a place, a testament to the diversity of human appetites with its dense thickets of strip clubs and tattoo parlours, boutiques and bars, galleries and secondhand stores, and of course, its homeless people, its alkies and junksters, its bright and tangy salad of youth subcultures.

There's always been something slightly other about Cuba St. Talk to the long-term shopkeepers here and they remember a time when people from central Wellington were suspicious of the place, seldom wandering far above that famous slosh-clank-slosh bucket fountain in the then-flash Cuba Mall, which opened in 1969. At that time, upper Cuba St was full of fishmongers and junk shops, and had a strong hippie element. The smell of patchouli oil drifted out of vegetarian cafes, and the smell of strong pot from the upstairs flats above the shops.

Around the same time the flamboyant drag queen Carmen, a former farmer's son from Taumarunui, opened one of the country's most infamous early brothels near here. It was called Carmen's International Coffee Lounge, on Vivian St. Downstairs, you could get coffee and toasted sandwiches. Upstairs, the menu was of a more carnal nature.

There's still a couple of strip clubs and sex shops in the area, and you can still stumble across some al fresco sexual activity if you cut through many of the little car parks behind the shops, but overall, Cuba St is low on glamour and sleaze compared to its 70s heyday.

In many ways, I love Cuba St as much for what it isn't as for what it is. In particular, I love it because it's not Courtenay Place. Turn the corner from Cuba St into Courtenay Place and you encounter the depressing sight of a major metropolitan centre acting like a small town.

Generic bars overflow with pissed teenagers and office workers. Bad nightclubs bash out techno remixes of old pop hits that were terrible the first time around. Takeaway bars churn out appalling tucker, much of which will end up chundered into shop doorways.

Young petrolheads race each up and down the street, and cops walk the beat, keeping a jaded eye on the usual trouble spots.

Cuba St is just a five-minute walk away, yet Courtenay Place's staggering hordes seldom venture there; the place is "too weird". This is good news for Cuba St. There is a concern, though, that as rapidly increasing rents force many of the smaller owner-operated stores out of Cuba St and developers build more apartment blocks and themed bars the character of this very special street may be lost.

In the meantime, Cuba St is a place that embraces diversity and steadfastly refuses to be boring. It's a comfortable, homely little inner-city bunker where eccentrics and individualists of every stripe peacefully coexist, a vibrant urban community that has somehow managed to stave off the kind of ho-hum homogenous development that has sucked the personality out of most of our other major cities.

With its lovely hills and bays, its thriving music scene, its palpable cultural and political energy, Wellington has many other things to recommend it, but without Cuba St, it becomes just another New Zealand city with bountiful assets and no heart. Thank God, then, for Cuba St.