St Kevins Arcade

This guide to St Kevins Arcade in Auckland opens with an act of political violence one Saturday afternoon in 1950, when men in a mix of army uniform and plain clothes forced their way into the Communist Party office upstairs and smashed its windows onto the arcade floor below. It also reaches back to a Depression-era riot on Karangahape Road that spilled into these same shopfronts, and forward to the Neo-Greek ironwork architect Walter Cumming gave the arcade in 1924. Look up at the timber and glass roof and leadlight windows as you walk toward the park at the far end.