It's Historic Preservation Week, and, as you admire the recently renovated frame house at the Mission Houses Museum on King Street, do a 180 and check out the structure next to City Hall. In the right light, you can read where "1820 * MISSION MEMORIAL * 1915" was chiseled off the building's architrave. City Hall Annex once had another mission
The building exudes stability and importance. That was the idea when the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, descendants of Hawaii's missionary families, built it in 1915. It was to be their archive and museum, educational facility, office and meeting place.
In World War II, Mayor Petrie then cast covetous eyes on the structure. Aha, thought he. That would be a wonderful place to have a traffic court, because all these out-of-town GIs are jamming the downtown police station. The city administration then moved to have the HEA's building condemned and seized.
There was wrangling over price. The city initially claimed it was worth only $162,000, but an independent audit in 1945 determined it was worth $401,660. So the city grabbed the building, rented some rooms to the HEA, and then Mayor Wilson kicked them out completely in 1947.
Since then, the building, known by the lovely name City Hall Annex, has housed collections such as the municipal library. We don't have a record of it ever serving as a traffic court. The current edition of the HEA has approached the City about returning it to house the Mission Houses Museum's growing collection. It would also make a good site for a municipal museum - Honolulu is the only state capitol without one.
A successor to the Mission Memorial Building was built in 1960 on Nuuanu Avenue, designed by the father-and-son architectural firm of Potter and Potter.
Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin