salon bohemienne: grafton 2011

The 'Salon Bohemienne' cafe on the corner of Grafton Rd and Grafton Bridge.

Grafton, with its impeccable bohemian credentials has got to be the best place in Auckland for a cafe aspiring to be a 'Salon Bohemienne'. For example: the New York-based painter Max Gimblett grew up there. By the 1950s, according to Redmer Yska in his book 'New Zealand Green', the talk at Auckland jazz clubs was of weed-fuelled black masses held deep in Grafton Gully. By 1967, a barefoot and ragged James K. Baxter was living with junkies in a Boyle Crescent squat, and the first arrest for possession of LSD in New Zealand was made next door. Ten years later the prototype Suburban Reptiles emerged from a Park Ave house where some of Split Enz also lived. In the 1980s, a sprawling Carlton Gore Rd house was home at different times to both the Twelve Tribes of Israel and a few Headless Chickens. The Twelve Tribes threw a pretty good party - so good that one night the deck, packed with people, collapsed. It's probably still pretty loose around Grafton today, but whenever we walk through, by day or by night, it seems ... very quiet.