Most people, asked to picture WestSide on a Tuesday morning, will picture coffee. Or shopfronts. Or the laneway beside Musicworks at 300 West with the buskers and the surf shop. They'd be right. That's the WestSide that gets photographed.
But two blocks north of all that, on a stretch of Market Street North between Karamu Road and the laneway, there's a different WestSide — one that's been quietly humming for years. The recruiters are open. The coworking offices are humming. Across in Queen Street West, the valuers are picking up the phone to revalue homes, farms and everything in between. This is the WestSide of workdays, not weekends. And locally, this short run of Market Street has a nickname.
"Wall Street."
The Hastings HIVE founders coined the "Wall Street" name and now use it in their own marketing. It's a smile at the size of the place — a four-block stretch of provincial New Zealand calling itself Wall Street with a straight face. But it earns the joke. Banks on one corner, accountants and lawyers on the next, House of Travel inside the ASB building, and over the past few years a coworking hub, two recruitment offices, a valuer, and a Tae Kwondo dojo have filled in around them. It's a working-life cluster you couldn't have planned, but it works.
This week, five new businesses from this stretch are joining the WestSide directory. Here's the walk.
The Hive
If there's one piece that makes the whole "Wall Street" idea legible, it's Hastings HIVE Coworking. Opened in January 2020, run by Rob Gill with community manager Claire as the day-to-day glue, it's a corporate-styled shared workspace tucked into 200 Market Street North — 23 private serviced offices, two boardrooms, five meeting rooms, two dedicated video-conference suites, espresso machine, showers, the works.
The pricing tells you who it's for: dedicated coworking desks from a few hundred a month. That's branch-office-from-Auckland money, freelancer-leaving-the-kitchen-table money, NGO-needs-a-real-meeting-room money. The HIVE hosts events for local businesses alongside their corporate satellite and one-person consulting clients — just shout out your needs and they'll make it happen. Business Hawke's Bay and the Hastings City Business Association are based out of the same building. That mix is the actual product.
Anyone who's tried to run a small business from a kitchen table — or a fast-growing one from a too-small office — knows the appeal. You walk in, plug in, and the boring parts of having a workplace (printer, Wi-Fi, meeting room, somewhere to take a real call) just happen.
The Hive does for office space
what good cafes do for coffee —
turns the basics into infrastructure.
The Hiring Spine
Across the road and a block south, two recruitment offices sit within five minutes of each other. Both are doing essentially the same work — putting Hawke's Bay people into Hawke's Bay jobs — but the way they do it could not be more different.
Two recruiters within 250 metres is unusual for a town of Hastings' size. It's also, on closer look, complementary rather than competitive: Adecco has the global machine behind it and the seasonal-scale specialism the region needs in autumn. Equip has the smaller-team, named-faces feel of a Bay-owned firm that's been working the same client list for over a decade. Different ways into the same problem.
The Valuer
Step around the corner onto Queen Street West and the work changes mood. Property valuation is the quiet trade that pre-dates almost everything else on the strip — and on this stretch, the name on the door has been there for four generations.
A valuer's the person you call when the price isn't a matter of opinion any more — when there's a mortgage to refinance, a property to settle, a lifestyle block to buy, an insurance claim that needs an independent number. The trade is unglamorous and consequential at the same time. Worth knowing the door before you need it.
The Reset
Working life isn't all transactions. A few doors down from Adecco, in a dojo at 128 Market, the after-school and after-work crowd kick, block and stretch their way through a Tae Kwondo class.
Master Camille started her own Tae Kwondo journey in 1983 as a young single mum looking for self-defence classes; forty-odd years later she's a 4th Dan running clubs across Hawke's Bay and into Auckland. The kids' classes here are the kind people sign up for "for the term" and stay in for a decade. The adult classes are the after-work-reset that doesn't involve a screen.
The Walk
Stand at the corner of Heretaunga and Market and look north. Adecco on your left. Koryo's dojo a few doors up the same side. Hastings HIVE one block further. Equip a short walk east on King. Williams' Harvey one block west on Queen. The whole working-life cluster fits inside a 250-metre radius. You could, on a single Wednesday morning, drop a CV at Adecco, sit a meeting in a HIVE conference room, get a property number off Williams' Harvey, swing by Equip on the way back, and still make it to the dojo for the 5:30pm class.
None of these businesses are new to Hawke's Bay — but they're new to the WestSide directory this week, and seen together, they describe a side of the strip that doesn't usually make the photos. The cafes and the shops are what visitors notice. The recruiters and the coworking floors are what the city quietly runs on.
The Sort-It-Out Season piece a few weeks back walked the same stretch with a household-admin lens — banks, accountants, lawyers, travel. This is the working-life lens on the same blocks. Same engine room. Different gears.
The Quick List
- Hastings HIVE Coworking — 200 Market St North. Hot desks, serviced offices, meeting rooms. Best place on the strip to set up a Bay branch office.
- Adecco Hastings — 117 Market St North. The global recruiter with the local horticulture, manufacturing and logistics specialism.
- Equip Recruitment — 201 King St North. NZ-owned, Bay-team, permanent + temp + contract across most sectors.
- Williams' Harvey Registered Valuers — 213 Queen St West. Four-generations-deep property valuers. Bank panel-accredited.
- Koryo Taekwondo Hawke's Bay — 128 Market St North. Master Camille's dojo. All ages, beginners welcome any time.
This is an editorial piece introducing five new WestSide directory members, not a recruitment, financial or fitness recommendation. For specifics on services, hours, fees, programmes or class times, talk to the businesses directly — every directory listing has direct contact details.
Hastings calls a four-block stretch of provincial Market Street "Wall Street" with one eyebrow raised. The joke is the scale; the truth is the function. This is where the city goes to work — and now there are five more reasons to walk that way.