The original of the giant hippopotamus that looms splendidly over the entrance of what was called the Museum Art Hotel (now QT Wellington Hotel) was born in my garage. I wave at it every time I walk by.
Our apartment block in Oriental Terrace was built 15 years ago by Chris Parkin (then-owner of the Museum Hotel). His ex-wife and their teenage son and daughter lived in the top apartment, just above ours, for several years. Parkin had bought the Michael Fowler Hotel on the waterfront (wanted for the site of Te Papa) and famously rolled it 120 metres across Cable Street, on rails and bogie trolleys, to its present location. After its eccentric beginnings, he wanted some equally eccentric decorations for his new hotel – preferably weird … zany… quirky.
His delightful daughter, Meredith, art/design student back then, decided to rise to the challenge and make the first zany contribution to her father’s new hotel. She started putting strange wire shapes up in the communal garage beneath our apartments. I was mystified when a long wire skeleton appeared. Then she added some legs and a giant snout. She started covering the wires – a fiddly long-winded process. Little eyes … little ears appeared. This shape was starting to look decidedly like a very large animal!
Meredith spent hours and hours down in the garage. She had to restrict her efforts to her free time away from design school, so it took many months. But, at last, a hippopotamus, large as life, stood in our garage, taking up almost a whole car space.
One day I went out and when I drove home – no Hippo. How it got transported to the Museum Art Hotel I have no idea. But finally it was positioned upstairs, just outside the Hippopotamus Restaurant. It stood guard outside the restaurant for many months before a patron who had over-imbibed, decided to have a ride on it. Hippo did not survive this undignified treatment and crumpled.
By this time the hippopotamus was the permanent name and motif of the restaurant, so a successor had to be made. But Hippo’s spirit lives on in the magnificent golden hippopotamus that bellows forth above the entrance to the QT Wellington Hotel.Whenever I go past I’m reminded that his forerunner was born in my garage.
— Judith Doyle, Bay View newsletter 73, April 2019