Galatos and Its Springy Dance Floor

The small two-story facade with its club sign conceals a large hall that once belonged to the Auckland branch of the closed Druid fraternity. Businesspeople and politicians met in a separate room, while the large hall was made available to city residents for lectures, meetings, and dances. The floor was assembled from small wooden rectangles so that it would give slightly underfoot and soften repeated dance steps. In the evenings, pairs sat around the floor with dinner on their laps, and ballroom-dancing enthusiasts valued this floor for its particular speed.

In January two thousand three, a security guard stood in the basement of Galatos and watched the dance-floor boards bowing overhead. Foo Fighters were playing upstairs. The band had come to Auckland for the Big Day Out festival, but the day before, they had agreed to perform here—in a few steps from Karangahape Road, before an audience of several hundred people.

All five hundred tickets were sold. The equipment took up so much space that the organizers had to cut the guest list, yet there were still worryingly many people. When the crowd began to jump, the floor started moving up and down. The security guard began stacking transport cases, trying to support the boards from below. He asked for the concert to be stopped: if the flooring gave way, both the audience upstairs and the people in the basement room would be hurt.

This floor was laid for entirely different movements. On May sixth, nineteen oh eight, the Auckland branch of the United Ancient Order of Druids opened its hall here. Druids were the members of a closed fraternal association of local businesspeople and politicians. They needed a room for their own meetings, but decided to make the large hall available to city residents for lectures, meetings, and dances.

The builders were specifically told to take dancers’ needs into account. The result was a springy parquet floor: the flooring allowed a slight give underfoot and softened repeated steps. Just a year later, long dance evenings with an orchestra were held here. In the nineteen twenties, visitors came in pairs, danced according to the program, then sat around the floor with dinner on their laps. Among Auckland ballroom-dancing enthusiasts, the floor acquired a reputation for being especially “fast.”

At the time, the building stood on North Street. The name Galatos appeared later and refers to the street, not to the druids. In nineteen forty-six, it was named in memory of the battle for the village of Galatas on Crete. On May twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-one, German units occupied the village; New Zealand units retook it in a nighttime counterattack, but could not hold it and withdrew. When the music venue received its present name, it inherited this military name from its address.

By the end of the twentieth century, dancing here had long ceased, and the building had already served as a rugby fans’ club and a private karaoke venue. In nineteen ninety-eight, journalist and publisher John Minty saw an opportunity rare in the club business: the building itself was for sale, whereas most Auckland venues had to be leased. Minty and his partners brought concerts back here. The small hall proved convenient for warming up major bands before festival performances—this is how Foo Fighters came to play here.

The floor did not give way that night. The main hall still has that same parquet floor of small rectangular blocks, laid for dancing more than a century ago. Its springy give, which the security guard tried to stop with transport cases, has survived with it.