Travel: Going Back to Old Hawaii
 | | The view of Diamond Head from the Halekulani Hotel. | | (Halekulani Hotel) |
An electric dread generated by the rising tide of war invaded the moonlit beaches of Hawaii in the 1930s; it carried on the soft trade winds and culminated in the irrevocable, explosive bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. An era on the islands ended at that moment, but you can still catch beautiful glimpses of it.
In perilous times, exotic geography can collide with history to kindle a bittersweet form of nostalgia that evokes memories both wistful and romantic. James Jones, a young infantryman posted to Schofield Barracks on Oahu, would write about this haunting mix of tropical splendor and imminent disaster in his World War II classic From Here to Eternity, a book that was to define Hawaii in the years before the war changed everything.
In 1930, 18,651 visitors arrived in the islands on cruise ships with names like Lurline and Matsonia. After Japan invaded Manchuria in the mid-thirties, the American military buildup began; by 1940 some 48,000 servicemen had crowded into Hawaii, to join the 25,373 travelers who that year sailed in to the charmed, isolated islands. Jones, an infantryman, would write home with a poignancy that cast foreboding shadows on that sunlit world: “You can . . . see the soft, warm, raggedy roofs of clouds stretching on and on and on. It almost seems as if you can look right on into eternity.” Many of the men who passed through the islands on their way to the war would never come back, and this created a soft echo of melancholy under all the wafting breezes, fragrant pikake, and gentle hulas.
The first jet aircraft arrived in the islands in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. By 1970, the planes were disgorging more than a million and a half passengers a year at Honolulu International Airport. Old Hawaii hands complained about the tourist deluge, and any new Pacific island destination was being described as “like Hawaii was 30 years ago,” implying a kind of paradise lost. In 2005 almost 9 million visitors went to the islands, many in search of this elusive idyll.
It’s elusive, but today the romantic idyll of prewar Hawaii can be found in elegantly restored grand hotels, in elaborate afternoon teas served on impossibly green lawns, in opulent homes now open as museums, in quiet corners and city parks. In Honolulu there are places and events designed to evoke an almost palpable longing for those lost years. Even Oahu’s military enclaves suggest that languorous period that existed before “Remember Pearl Harbor” became a battle cry.
On “Boat Days” in the twenties and thirties, ships put into Honolulu Harbor next to the Aloha Tower, built in 1926 and for 40 years the tallest structure on the islands; local boys swam out to greet the new arrivals while the Royal Hawaiian Band played on the docks. Today’s Aloha Tower has been restored and updated with shops and restaurants, and cruise ships still put into the dock.
Prewar tourists moved into the three grand hotels that still hold court on broad Waikiki Beach: the Halekulani (www.halekulani.com), (“so swank most tourists never heard of it,” Jones would write); the Moana (www.moana-surfrider.com), with its oceanfront Banyan Court named for the massive tree planted there in 1904; and the Royal Hawaiian (www.royal-hawaiian.com), where Jones described “feeling suddenly the presence of richness and wealth and ease that seeped through the screen of bushes.” Movie stars and British royalty stayed for months at a time. The beach boys taught them to surf and to party; celebrities and aristocrats donned hand-painted aloha shirts with buttons fashioned from coconuts, drank mai tais while looking out to a sea painted pink by the sunset, and were entertained by hula dancers and ukulele virtuosos.
In l984, a new, even more luxurious low-rise Halekulani was built to replace the old collection of buildings, and along the way the Moana and the Royal were restored to an elegance and comfort that almost certainly surpasses what they were in the l930s. (Think air conditioning.) Though surrounded now by high-rise hotels, these three continue to set the standard for luxury and style on Waikiki Beach, with prices to match. When the waves are up, one of the best surfing vantage points is the Mai Tai Bar in the Royal Hawaiian, a genteel 1930s oasis in a twenty-first-century world. One of the most timeless places to watch a sunset is beachside at the Halekulani’s “House Without a Key,” especially if it is one of the nights when Kanoe Miller is dancing the hula, as she has done for 29 years now.
The public is welcome to sign on for one of the hour-long tours of the century-old Beaux-Arts style Moana building, which begin in the historical room on the second floor. Late afternoon is a good time to settle in on the Banyan Court or the wraparound veranda, where the radio program Hawaii Calls was first broadcast in 1935. For 30 years it brought Hawaiian music—Sweet Leilani, Lovely Hula Hands—into 600,000 mainland living rooms. Every evening local Hawaiian musicians play some of those same songs in the Court.
The schlock that typified the Hawaii tourist scene in the 1970s and ’80s is now high camp; plastic grass skirts are out; a renaissance of all things authentically Hawaiian is in. And retro aloha shirts are so popular they are sold at Kmart on the mainland.
Authentic Hawaiian music can be found even in the heart of tourist central, Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki. There every Thursday, at the Waikiki Beach Marriott (www.marriottwaikiki.com), the legendary Auntie Genoa Keawe sings in traditional Hawaiian falsetto. The 86-year-old started her career before World War II, performing in officers’ clubs. Down the street the DFS Galleria uses the old Hawaiian Boat Days as a historic theme and includes a free show featuring hula costume styles from the twenties through the forties.
The prewar decades offered a languorous, romantic existence for those who could afford swank accommodations. For members of the military, Hawaii was not quite so enchanting. Jones describes a 1940 payday night in downtown Honolulu: “The cab moved . . . past the dark palm-studded lawn of the Y itself, with the Black Cat across the street and also overflowing. A number of drunks lay passed out on the Y lawn.” What is remembered as the “infamous” Black Cat bar is gone, along with the brothels of Hotel Street, and today no drunks will be passed out on the lawn of the old Armed Forces YMCA.
That dignified Spanish-Mission style Y, built in 1928, was extensively restored in l989 and now houses the remarkable Hawai‘i State Art Museum (www.state.hi.us), which opened at the end of 2002. The cool, high ceilings of the grand second-floor lobby, with its polished tile floors, lead into 10,000 feet of gallery space where the best of Hawaiian art from 1940 to the present is exhibited. According to the curator Lisa Yoshihara, every December 7 a group of World War II veterans gather outside and stand looking at the building. “I know they were here during the war when the Y sponsored dances and had a library and activities,” she says. “I invite them in to see what we have done to their YMCA.”
A mile away the bones of pre-war Chinatown are there, without the bars and brothels but with plenty of Asian atmosphere. A walking tour (www.chinatownhi.com) takes you past food markets with exotic fruits and vegetables, a herbalist, several fine art galleries (including Pegge Hopper’s), the beautifully restored Hawaii Theater Center, and restaurants with amazing repertoires of dim sum. On the first Friday evening of every month, all the galleries and shops in Chinatown stay open to the public, and there’s music and entertainment. The streets throng with local folks and visitors alike.
An architectural walk through historic old Honolulu is offered on Saturday mornings, guided by architects of the American Institute of Architects (www.aiahonolulu.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=29). The tour takes in the old C. Brewer building, a two-story stone structure designed by New York architects in a style so distinctive it came to be called Hawaiian Regional. Built in 1930 as offices for one of the Big Five’s companies, it was restored in 1998.
The Big Five—the powerful businessmen who ran Hawaii—were not the only outlandishly rich who lived in the islands in the early part of the last century. Doris Duke owned a fabulous five-acre beach estate at the foot of Diamond Head; the main house is 14,000 square feet surrounding a seafront patio; there are pools and ponds and a Mughal garden, and a guest house called the “Playhouse” modeled after a seventeenth-century Iranian royal pavilion. On her honeymoon in 1935 Duke began to collect the Islamic art that would fill her Shangri La, as she named it. In November of 2002, the estate was opened to the public. The Arts of the Islamic World gallery of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (www.honoluluacademy.org) serves as the orientation and staging center for tours of Duke’s fabulous residence. Now anyone with $25 can sign on at the Academy and be transported there by minivan. A word to the wise: Book weeks in advance.
Shangri La is fantasy 1930s that was experienced by a very few; the mere infantryman James Jones would not have been allowed anywhere near it. Paradoxically, it is the military—with its devotion to history and tradition and esprit de corps—that has best preserved those enclaves evocative of the 1930s and ’40s.
Because of Fort DeRussy, Waikiki has one stretch of beach mostly unchanged since a shoreline battery was built there in 1908. It now houses what on first glance appears to be an uninspired U.S. Army Museum (www.hiarmymuseumsoc.org). In fact the place offers a fascinating glimpse of that era when history collided with Hawaii; those who go in come out with an appreciation for all the men and women who paused in these gentle islands on their way to war.
To see as many of the prewar posts as possible, I signed on for the Home of the Brave Historical Military Base Tour (www.pearlharborhq.com), where I was cheered onto a small bus by a guide dressed in a World War II Army Air Corps uniform. A television mounted in the front of the bus showed newsreel and movie clips, From Here to Eternity among them.
The bus heads for Schofield Barracks, only half an hour north of Honolulu by freeway. The older buildings there are Art Deco or Renaissance Revival in style, and there are trim parade grounds and flowering jacaranda trees and officers’ circles with roomy old houses set on manicured lawns. From Here to Eternity was filmed there; in 1940 James Jones was quartered in one of the three-story quadrangles, and they’re still very much in use by the men of the Tropic Lightning Division.
Next door is an old lava-rock building that was a library when the aspiring writer was there and is now the base museum. On one wall, a tribute to James Jones explains that “the Army of the ’30s was small and professional, isolated from society, extremely structured and often boring.” Across from the main gate is a tavern called Kem’oo Farms, for six decades a favorite with the soldiers of Schofield. The bar is suitably dark and dank, smelling of stale beer and high times. On the lanai, young women soldiers in starched camouflage fatigues talk about friends just back from Iraq.
At nearby Wheeler Army Airfield, the bus bumps along the flight line taken by the Japanese Zeros on that long-ago Sunday and pulls up near a few old fighter planes parked in the grass, including a P-40. A few feet away is the empty airfield where Japanese fighters strafed American planes lined up in precise rows. Hangars were set ablaze and black smoke billowed into the air as the Japanese planes moved on to Pearl Harbor. At Hickam Field, the few hangars that survived are marked with traces of bullet fragments.
Fort Shafter is the oldest of the military installations on the island, the most pristine, and the most evocative of the thirties and forties. Today, as headquarters of the U.S. Army Pacific Command, it is called the “Pineapple Pentagon.” Palm Circle is where high-ranking officers live in big, rambling houses. Sunlight filters through the tall trees, throwing moving shadows onto the greensward and setting a scene that is deceptively serene, since the global war on terror is today’s challenge. In the lobby of the headquarters, flags fly in remembrance of other conflicts—the Philippine Insurrection of l898, the China Relief Expedition of 1900, the Korean War of the 1950s.
The Home of the Brave Tour group settled in for lunch on the spacious lanai of the officers’ club, accompanied by a young corpsman assigned as security in an era when the nation is once again on a war footing. Fort Shafter offers a kind of parallel universe, where the past seems to hover at the edges of vision. It is easy to imagine this place early on that Sunday morning in December, before the Japanese Zeros swooped in to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial (www.nps.gov/usar/) remain, year after year, the most popular tourist destination in Hawaii, attracting a million and a half visitors. A Navy launch transports groups to the gleaming white marble Memorial, built above the sunken battleship USS Arizona. Facing a wall of names—young men who died that day, some of them still entombed in the ship below—the visitor understands that this is where the old idyll ended, that the peaceful isolation of the Hawaiian Islands was over that Sunday in 1941. The romance was shattered to be replaced by a nostalgia that would not go away.
—Shirley Streshinsky is the author of Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness.
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