Parnell

This guide to Parnell in Auckland opens in the nineteen sixties, when the suburb's Victorian shops and cottages sat boarded up and marked for demolition. It follows Les Harvey, a property developer often mistaken for hired labor as he knelt planting flowers or laying bricks, as he began buying up the condemned buildings one by one while frequenting the city's demolition yards for cheap materials. He is remembered, locals say, as a man who was rarely seen without a trowel or a spade in his hand.