The net result was that while the names of these streets were submitted and accepted by the City Council, they never became ‘roads’ as we normally think of them but remain today as simple pathways and rows of steps.
Vogel Street, McIntyre Avenue and Kennedy Street (all off Hawker Street in Mt Victoria) are all examples of these.
Another is Brosnahan Terrace in Aro Valley. Originally created as a proposed link between Holloway Road and Mt Pleasant Road at a time when hundreds of people lived in the area (then known as Mitchelltown), the street sign for the Brosnahan Terrace leads only to a simple path without any houses surrounded by regenerating native bush.
And what exactly are ghost streets?
A similar curiosity is a number of ‘ghost’ streets which are scattered throughout the inner city.
These once contained houses and were parts of thriving communities but were acquired for road widening purposes or the construction of the motorway and knowledge of them gradually disappeared.
While they are no longer part of our urban streetscape, the legal ‘parcels’ which once formed these streets often remain to this day as the cost of legally amalgamating the land titles was deemed to be an unnecessary expense.