in 1937, and in 1943 operations were sold to the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company. Chinese market gardens and suburbanisation In 1915, a new, wider bridge across the Manukau Harbour was opened, after the original was declared unsafe and closed the previous year. The first Chinese New Zealanders arrived in the area in 1915, and ten years later the first freehold land was sold to a Chinese buyer. Between the 1920s and 1940s, a large proportion of the area was used for Chinese-owned and operated market gardens. By 1954, over half of the registered market gardens in the Māngere-Onehunga area were run by Chinese families. Other employers in the area included a quarry established at Taylor Road in the mid-1920s (running until 1963), rope works, and a dancehall and tearooms called the Oriental Rendezvous, which was built on the waterfront and became a regular fixture of Auckland nightlife until it burnt down in 1932. In 1932, a water reservoir was constructed atop Māngere Mountain, and in the late 1930s the area was electrified. In the 1950s, the area changed from mostly rural to suburban, as Māngere Bridge was developed for housing, extending west past Seaforth Avenue in 1959. The Māngere Bridge town centre began to develop in the 1950s and 1960s (mostly undeveloped until this time, due to the close proximity of the shops in Onehunga), during which the first banks were built in the suburb. In 1954, Māngere Bridge formed as a county town within the Manukau County Council, and in 1965 it became a suburb of the newly formed Manukau City. In 1965, the Te Puea Memorial Marae was opened, later becoming a temporary refuge to help combat growing homelessness in New Zealand. The area saw significant increase in traffic after the opening of the Auckland Airport in 1966. Māngere sewage ponds, new bridges and the Southwestern Motorway In 1960, the Manukau Sewage Purification Works (now Māngere Wastewater Treatment Plant) was opened, using an algae-based system to process the waste for the majority of the Auckland region with oxidation ponds in the Manukau Harbour and Māngere Lagoon, extending outwards to Puketutu Island. The Manukau Harbour site was chosen in 1954 to replace the Ōkahu Bay sewage tanks (the site of modern-day Kelly Tarlton's Sea Life Aquarium). The Manukau Harbour became the preferred site after Dove-Myer Robinson lobbied against the planned Motukorea / Browns Island sewage plant. The ponds