DIA set up shop when downtown was threatened with seeing a new State Capitol built elsewhere and its retail vitality drained by the opening of Ala Moana Center.
Since then it has fought back by keeping the Capitol, adding a new federal building, and spawning 24 office high rises plus 12 condominium high rises.
From very low numbers, downtown's resident population grew to 10,000 and its daytime population grew from 8,000 to 60,000. Land values have climbed enormously.
As a visitor attraction, downtown's charms remain something of a secret to both tourists and residents. Yet it has become simply great and by police statistics quite safe overall.
It offers the historic Capital District, with the royal palace and missionary houses, the seats of city, state and federal government, a vastly more attractive waterfront centered on Aloha Tower Marketplace, the offices of Hawaii's major businesses in an attractively developed core, a revitalized Chinatown, a new Fort Street Mall retail area, a first-rate business hotel (at last, Executive Centre), good restaurants plus marketplaces and small shops where you can taste the foods of Asia, Hawaii, the U.S. mainland and Europe.
It is a place for browsing - art shops not far from the few surviving porn shops on Hotel Street, Chinese medicinal shops, noodle shops, the open-air markets, numerous small parks and some 90 fountains and sculptures. It has a harbor front worth a long walk and grassy open space in the Capital District.
The supply of low-priced public parking is limited, but market-priced private parking pretty well assures you can always find a parking place. I once counted the trees in downtown's core. They added up to a small forest and are increasing.
There's a small high rise, Marin Tower, with a pointed red cap that DIA called "the Smyser Cap" because Mayor Jeremy Harris, then managing director, had the developer add the cap after reading my columns about how boring the downtown skyline was, a condition that no longer exists.
There are such niceties as being able to valet park at Indigo Restaurant on Nuuanu Avenue, walk out its back door after dinner to attend a show at the gorgeously restored Hawaii Theatre next door and pick up your car from the valet after the show.
The Chinatown open-air markets kept up their charm even after being forced to renovate to meet health standards.
THIRTY-EIGHT years of restaurant prices in downtown Honolulu are capsulized in this statistic: DIA's first annual lunch at Wo Fat's (now closed) cost $1.25 for five Chinese courses. Its final one at Young Sing cost $20.
Traffic flows better because Hotel Street has become a bus mall and one-way streets have been increased but DIA's outgoing executive director, William Grant, says his greatest disappointment is that the city has twice refused to build a rail transit system across Honolulu and via an underground system through downtown.
That same disappointment is still expressed by Aaron Levine, executive head of a sister planning group, the Oahu Development Conference, that closed shop in 1986. Both men are sure we will be forced to rail transit in the future. Both regret that we didn't do it when 80 percent federal funding was available.