DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM
Ruth Limtiaco stands in the courtyard of 1210 Auahi St. She's among the last tenants to leave the structure, which is slated for demolition Monday.
Obsolete oasis
Victoria Ward's Garden Office
Building is losing its last tenants
today as it makes way for
a luxury high-rise
A small office building that was much loved by its tenants for nearly 40 years is nearly empty today, and its former occupants are mourning the loss of their "little oasis."
Victoria Ward Ltd.'s Garden Office Building, a two-story walkup at the end of Auahi Street where it meets the new Queen Street extension, is due for the wrecker's ball. It will make way for part of the luxury $210 million, 40-story Hokua residential condominium.
While they loved the place, with its abundant tropical foliage and big fountain-equipped central courtyard, ex-tenants say they were treated well by Victoria Ward and they have long known that progress had to happen.
They also knew an office building with 29,350 square feet of leasable space on a 103,900-square-foot parcel wasn't very realistic in today's commercial real estate market.
Designed by Honolulu architect Donald Chapman and completed in 1964, the complex is clearly of another era.
"I've been here 10 years," said public relations consultant Ruth Limtiaco whose firm, The Limtiaco Co., was getting ready yesterday to move out of its 1,150 square feet of space on the upper of the two floors.
People who visited the firm "invariably were effusive about how pleasant the atmosphere is," she said. "It's been a real joy to work in this building."
She even likes going in at weekends to get things done quietly, enjoying the view of the palm trees she gets from the floor-to-ceiling windows that are a key to the design.
Besides, she said, parking was much cheaper than any she can get around her new location, in the former Hawaii Times building on Nuuanu Avenue.
But she said her 10-employee business, now 14 years old, is growing and needs more space. She expects to grow into the 2,000 square feet of the new location.
Limtiaco will take home the small company nameplate that was on her office door, she said, partly as a souvenir of the good times, but also because "I don't want my company name being smashed by some wrecking ball."
Tenants have to be out and hand in their keys by tonight and the building gets handed over to a demolition crew on Monday.
Victoria Ward officials said the many palms, mock orange trees, banana plants and other tropical vegetation will be rescued by a landscaping business. Some of it may go into the new public park to be developed on the mauka half of the property.
The company said glass, doors and other assets will be salvaged as much as possible before the destruction.
Mark Stewart moved his Stewart & Associates residential real estate management business into a ground-floor space of a little more than 500 square feet more than 20 years ago. He was one of several who used the word "oasis" to describe the property.
"I loved it. It was unique," he said, but as someone experienced in real estate himself, he acknowledged "it just was not an economical use of the space. It was a pleasure to be there and Victoria Ward was a great landlord. They treated us very fairly and gave us more than adequate time to move out," Stewart said.
"And when we found something else, they stopped charging us rent" while a move was arranged, he said. Stewart & Associates itself had a space available, a unit in the Century Center condominium that Stewart owned, where a tenant was moving out, he said.
"It's in a high-rise, which I didn't want to be in," he said, but the shift in August has worked out all right for his business.
Becky Tillery, principal broker at Retail Strategies Inc. on the second floor, said the company has been in the building about 10 years and she has been there about six. "It is just the nicest office building in the state. It is so, so pleasant. It is that peaceful," she said.
Her company, headed by Doug Smoyer, is staying in the neighborhood, moving into the building across the street that is generally known as the IBM Building. Victoria Ward has already moved its offices into that building.
"I think oasis is a good word, when you have tenants who have been there 20-30 years and are devastated about leaving," she said.
There were a couple of feral cats that were looked after by tenants for years and while one disappeared, the one remaining was adopted and taken home by a tenant, she said.
Meanwhile, the wreckers have already demolished the property next door, starting from the former Chevron gasoline station on the Ala Moana-Queen Street corner.
Just mauka of the Garden Office, work is well under way on what will be a Queen Street extension, enabling Queen to run all the way through Kakaako Mauka to join Ala Moana across from the Ala Moana Beach Park.
Sandy Pfund, acting executive director of the Hawaii Community Development Authority, said the area will be attractive when the work is all done. There will be parks on both sides of Queen and the one that will occupy about half of the Garden Office site will have plenty of shade and places for people to stroll, she said.
