View Point

Friday, May 8, 1998

Satisfaction with
Waikiki must be
registered at polls

Relentless push to build strips
Waikiki of history and all human scale

By Briana Poilon

AS this election year roars into full swing at July candidate registration deadlines, Waikiki will be under high-profile scrutiny as a campaign issue. I can't help wondering if voters will look into some candidates' histories and stated ideals compared to their actual voting records.

There are startling answers "out there" for the intrepid few who ask questions of their elected officials, particularly neighbors, friends and governmental public-access centers of information.

For example, there are Campaign Spending Commission files, corporate listings, Department of Land Utilization actions and files, Waikiki Special District amendments and how they got that way, and so many other kinds of information that anyone who can read or pick up a phone can find out , if the effort is made.

As Waikiki is being transformed by frantic efforts to "revitalize" it into Nike Centers and similar superblock malls, no one seems particularly alarmed that Waikiki's neighborhoods, vestiges of its real history, are disappearing at a brisk pace.

Developers and planners are already working on the demise of its remaining theaters, which would end going to the movies for residents in or out of Waikiki.

"Who really cares?" It is always the operative question in Hawaii, and theaters just don't offer the per-square-foot dollar profits that superblocks seem to promise -- at least in theory.

All we need to revitalize our economy, according to the mayor, is to throw up still more superblock projects as long as we describe them as having a "Hawaiian sense of place," a catchphrase created by someone who couldn't have been Hawaiian.

Outside my second-story windows, I watch enormous, booming trucks that steadily dredge up silt and watery waste from an Ohua/Kalakaua project, and dump the "mystery sludge" into a giant pit dug below me on the former summer home and gardens of Princess Kaiulani, "Aina Hau."

I can't help feeling sadness as every vestige of anything historical in this most distinctive hometown in the world is replaced by "historical markers," statues or worse.

I can envision a Waikiki bearing a striking resemblance to the Landmark at its entrance: Measured numbers of new little palm trees here and there, concrete pools and monolithic architecture. (My Hawaiian friend, Mathilda, calls the Landmark the "giant robot.")

Is Waikiki headed toward a sterilization nightmare where nothing of history or memory will be left?

There is a tiny green cottage next to my two-story where Robert Louis Stevenson slept, amorously infatuated with the princess across the road at "Aina Hau."

Is the election-year push for projects going to re-engineer Waikiki into one gigantic shopping mall, rather than preserve some semblance of Waikiki's history, and commission more token statues of greats like Duke Kahanamoku, and markers telling people where old parts of Waikiki used to be before they were paved over?

For every one of former chief planner Ben Lee's proposed "10,000 palms" in the hotly debated master plan for Waikiki, does there have to be the same number of genuine residents engineered out of Waikiki to accommodate trees?

Waikiki is a unique neighborhood, partly because it is, perhaps, the most dreamed-about destination in the world. There's an authentic permanent community here, and although not all residents who live and work here register with the census, there are easily more than 20,000 people living in Waikiki, and about 36,000 working here.

Low-rise neighbors tend to be much more concerned with crime in the streets than someone lucky enough to live on the 25th floor of one of Waikiki's massive high-rises, whose locked parking areas and security doors already dominate the landscapes of Waikiki.

There is a valid place and purpose for moderately priced low-rises, where neighbors are far closer to neighborhood streets and what goes on there. People in smaller, human-scale buildings tend to take responsibility for the safety of their block and surrounding neighborhood. I've seen that in action with the neighborhood police watch activities in my own corner.

So as human-scale buildings, small shops and homes disappear, I can't help asking if a safe and viable community could ever survive the election year agenda of this or any future mayor, as "economic renewal" pours what looks like toxic waste into a giant hole across from my home of more than 20 years.

I believe Princess Kaiulani and Robert Louis Stevenson would cry to see where they once walked in her garden, much of which is still blooming right next to the giant pit filled with "mystery waste."

Will complacency or the ignorance of voters and agendas of giant developers whose only motive is profit, allow all of old Waikiki to be erased and transformed into a homogenized, memory-less wasteland of taller, slimmer edifices?

The wasting of Waikiki is no mystery to anyone who can read and who cares about its future.

---

Briana Poilon is director of the Waikiki Tenants Association.