| Brief Description |
This black and white photograph is a panorama of Wanganui from the Bell Tower at Cooks Gardens, looking over the town towards Bastia Hill where the Fire Brigade Tower was later built. Image taken in 1923.
Wanganui was a prosperous town of 24,000 with notable civic amenities such as the newly-built Sarjeant Gallery (centre) when this panorama was made from the balcony of the bell tower in Cooks Gardens.
The tower, the second on the site, dates from the early 1890s. Both were built as fire watchtowers. The fireman on duty at night rang the bell at a sign of fire, the number of strokes indicating the area of town the fire was in. After a series of earthquakes in the early 1930s the weakened tower of the Post Office on the corner of Ridgway Street and Victoria Avenue was taken down and its chiming set of bells relocated in the Cooks Gardens tower.
|
