USS Arizona Memorial Visitor Center superintendent, on sagging at the 19,325-square-foot center
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Preserving history
Supporters seek $34 million
to replace the slowly sinking
Arizona visitor center
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It's only 9 a.m., but the crowd is elbow-to-elbow in the USS Arizona Memorial Visitor Center's museum. Every 15 minutes, 30 times a day, 150 people are shuttled by Navy boats to this national shrine. The crush and the lines get even more intense and longer between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when at least 1.5 million visitors pay homage at the state's leading tourist destination.
For Pat and Ann Rothery, a visit to the Arizona Memorial -- the only National Park Service memorial run in partnership with the U.S. Navy -- was a must.
"The last time I was here was 40 years ago and everything has really changed," Pat Rothery, of Atlanta, told Douglas Lentz, who has been the center's superintendent for three years.
Designed more than two decades ago to accommodate 2,400 visitors a day, the visitor center now has twice that amount and is sagging under that burden.
"There are a lot of subtle changes going on," Lentz said. "The visitors can't see it, but the building is slowly settling."
Last year, two different structural studies confirmed that the center has to be replaced within five to 10 years.
Portions of the 19,325-square-foot visitor center have sunk as much as 30 inches since it opened in 1980.
Mathew Sgan, senior vice president for development for the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund, estimated that it will take $34 million to build a new "gateway" to the Pearl Harbor memorial experience that would not only include a new visitor center to the battleship that was sunk during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, but also other visitor attractions in the area.
Douglas Lentz, USS Arizona Memorial Visitor Center superintendent, autographs a child's guide to the memorial for Maryland fifth-grader Noah Diekemper near the visitor center. The site, which was designed more than two decades ago to accommodate 2,400 visitors a day, now hosts twice that amount and is sagging under that burden.
Sgan said the center, built on 11 acres of land dredged from Pearl Harbor, has been lifted four times. As a result, the lower level of the facility is nearing the water table, and encroaching water from the harbor threatens the concrete structures.
Of the $34 million needed for the visitor center, Sgan said his group plans to raise $23 million from private sources and hopes to get the remaining $11 million from federal, state and county sources.
"So far, we have raised $9 million from private gifts," Sgan said of the group, which has about 20,000 supporters.
The fund's honorary chairmen are actor Tom Hanks and U.S. Sens. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and John McCain, R-Ariz. Retired Adm. Thomas Fargo, former Pacific Command chief, was recently named vice chairman of its board of directors and will serve as chairman of the organization's new Hawaii Advisory Council.
Fargo said last week the Hawaii's group's target is to raise at least $1.25 million of the overall goal of $34 million to rebuild the center to "make the operation down at Pearl Harbor absolutely successful and conducive to all of the visitors that join us here in Hawaii."
At the kickoff of the local campaign at Washington Place, Gov. Linda Lingle last week noted: "The Pearl Harbor museum and the Arizona Memorial are significant not just to us and not just to the nation, but I believe they're significant to the world. And, going forward, a reminder of peace."
Inouye has secured $1.69 million as part of the current U.S. Interior Department's appropriations bill. It was Inouye who also helped get initial federal funding for the memorial and later shepherded the agreement with the Navy that turned over control of the visitor center to the park service in 1980.
The state Legislature this year set aside another $500,000. Sgan's group hopes that eventually the state will be able to appropriate $7 million, with an additional $1 million coming from the Honolulu City Council.
The replacement complex will be a single-story building with 23,600 square feet. It would provide space for a museum, two theaters doubling its current capacity, bookstore, a classroom and security. The National Park Service and the Arizona Memorial Museum Association would share a 10,700-square-foot headquarters facility.
The association wants to double the size of the museum from its current 2,500 square feet.
The museum lacks sufficient space to display thousands of donated artifacts, which remain in warehouses.
Additionally, the current design of the museum, originally built with open-air exhibits to take advantage of the warm Hawaiian weather, does not allow for adequate atmospheric control, said Daniel Martinez, National Park Service historian.
There also is now a nearly two-hour wait until visitors can view a 23-minute film on the 1941 attack before being ferried out to the memorial, which straddles the midsection of the battleship Arizona. Both U.S. and Japanese footage of the attack is incorporated into the film, which chronicles the Dec. 7 events that led to the U.S. entry into World War II.
Sgan said the white Arizona memorial, which was built in 1962, can accommodate only 300 visitors at one time.
Construction could begin as early as March 2007, with completion within 18 to 20 months later, Sgan said.
During that construction period, Sgan said every attempt will be made "to make the memorial accessible to the public" and tents may be erected to continue its operations.
"It's an important symbol," Sgan added.
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