Why the gallery is here

The Moana opened on 11 March 1901. Four stories, seventy-five rooms, a private bath and a telephone in each of them, and the first electric elevator in the territory. Oliver G. Traphagen drew it, the Lucas Brothers built it, and Walter Chamberlain Peacock paid about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it.

What stood around it was not the Waikīkī on the postcards. It was farmed. Hawaiian families worked loʻi kalo and loko iʻa here, irrigated taro terraces and fishponds, some of them centuries old, alongside Chinese and Japanese rice growers and duck farmers. This was not empty ground. It was the most productive land on this side of the island. Waikīkī means spouting water, for the streams and springs that fed it.

It was Waikīkī’s first large hotel. It was not the first hotel here, whatever anyone tells you: the Sans Souci was taking guests by about 1884 and the Park Beach followed in 1888. What the Moana was, is the building that started the business of coming to Waikīkī.

A pier ran about three hundred feet out from it, with a pavilion at the far end. It was gone by the 1930s.

That business is what drained the ground the hotel was standing on. The Ala Wai Canal was dug from 1921 to 1928. It took the loʻi and the fishponds, ended the farming, and made the land into the Waikīkī that is here now. The water Waikīkī is named for runs under the canal.

Duke Kahanamoku, Knute Cottrell and Kenneth Winter sat under a hau tree by the hotel’s bathhouse and named a club. Hui Nalu, the Club of the Waves.

The bathhouse was the clubroom. Dues were a dollar a year, and what a dollar bought you was a hook to hang your clothes on. The members were known around the beach as the Moana Bathhouse Gang.

The Outrigger Canoe Club was formed in the same years, a few hundred yards along, and the two were friendly rivals. Outrigger drew members who could pay a subscription. Hui Nalu drew watermen who could not. Some men belonged to both.

When the 1912 Olympic trials came, Hui Nalu paid his way to them by subscription and donation. He came back from Stockholm with two medals.

The Moana became the headquarters of the Waikīkī beachboys. They were Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian men, most of them grown, and boy was the word the hotels used. They taught visitors to surf and to ride an outrigger canoe, they swam people out past the break and back, and they made a living at it from the hotel beachfronts. Duke worked as one.

Hui Nalu’s captain, Edward Miller, known as Dude, negotiated the beach concession with the hotel. That is the documented commercial link between Duke’s club and this building: his club held the hotel’s beach concession.

Before any of it, as a boy, he trained in the Alakea Slip in Honolulu Harbor and dove for coins thrown off the rails by arriving passengers on boat days.

The Indian banyan in the courtyard was planted in 1904 by Jared Smith of the federal experiment station. It is about seventy-five feet high now, with a spread of about a hundred and fifty, and it has been on Hawaiʻi’s Rare and Exceptional Tree List since 1979.

From 3 July 1935 until 16 August 1975, most Saturdays, Hawaii Calls was broadcast live from under it. Webley Edwards made it and hosted it, and at its height it went out on hundreds of stations. For forty years, a great many people’s idea of what Hawaiʻi sounded like was made in this courtyard.

The hotel took two more floors and two concrete wings in 1918. Matson Navigation bought it in 1932 and built the Surfrider next door in 1952. The three buildings were made into one in a restoration finished in 1989. The 1901 building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 7 August 1972.

A room carrying his name could have gone anywhere in Waikīkī. Most of Waikīkī would have taken it.

It is here because the connection is a matter of record rather than sentiment. He named his club on this lawn. The clubroom was the hotel’s bathhouse. His club held the hotel’s beach concession. He grew up at the far end of this same stretch of sand, and the bronze of him stands a few hundred steps down Kalākaua.

There is no plaque here that says he stood on this spot, and we are not going to invent one.