In Cuba Street, Wellington, back in the 90’s, they probably did
When a friend said she remembered
Cuba Street as being “bohemian” in 97, I laughed and
said that by 97 it had already become a safe space for office dwellers
to visit and pretend they were living dangerously.
Later I dug out my “Cuba
Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are
from that calendar and were taken in 91. When we opened our bike shop “Cycle
Services” in 1991, Cuba Street was not just where you went for a grunty
coffee or some second hand stuff, it was also the first place to go to
for drugs and prostitutes.
Now I’ll go on about drugs a bit
here. I was new to all this scene, and to me “drugs” basically meant
smoking some pot or maybe spotting some oil.
As a cyclist I was pretty
familiar with ephedrine which was actually still legal in NZ in 91 and
was very popular, used as a sort of everyday speed. When it was outlawed
it just went underground like all the other drugs.
Most people use coffee for the same purpose now. And coffee in Cuba St was said to be some of the strongest in the world.
The first time I walked in on a
drug deal my eyes nearly popped out of my head. A respectable looking
man in a suit, with a large brief case, had it open and was discussing
bulk pricing with a couple of our bike shop customers on the huge range
of drugs that he had samples of.
Apart from pot, the popular one
in Wellington in those days was acid. But you could buy anything you
wanted really, including heroin. I was told the cocaine was a rip off in
NZ, and that was why nobody here was much into it.
What Wellington was infamous for
in 91 was glue sniffers. And sometimes Cuba St was like zombie dawn of
the dead. Deranged glue sniffers everywhere, staggering about, holding
their plastic bags and drooling.
Some of the people on the street
were fairly tough, and just up the road was the BP’s (Black Power) who
ran a tinny house ($20 foil wrapped servings of pretty average pot). But
you didn’t take photos of the BP’s, you casually crossed the road when
you saw them coming, so there are no photos of them here!
This was in the days before
digital cameras, and mobile phones had only just come out. They cost
$3000 and were the size of a brick. This next photo was taken in front
of the second hand book shop next door to us (note our Cycles Peloton
sign in the top left). And the poor guy in the photo was stabbed to
death a few months later…
Our neighbours on the other side
were Midnight Espresso, the legendary coffee shop, and this is a young
Geoff Marsland (Havana Coffee Works) in our doorway
Although I did have a camera, I
didn’t take many photos because buying film and developing it was
expensive. Part of why I started taking thousands of photos when I got
my first digital camera a decade later is because I knew just what I had
missed getting photos of back in the early 90’s. And some of them would
have been quite something.
I guess this is all looks like a
window back to an old forgotten time now, but as a young and
impressionable munter, this was the environment that shaped me. And even
now I’m partly still a guy from old time Cuba St, rather than an over
the hill computer addict.
When I hear millennials getting
offended by lame bullshit I wish I could push a button and transplant
them to Cuba Street in 91. It was an amazing place, but some of them
might just have gotten their whingeing faggy heads smacked in…
Those were awesome times back in the days before computers.
And getting “offended” wasn’t that viable an option
All photos taken by Barry Thomas
