United States – PLACE ODDITY

WALKING WAIKIKI’S CIRCUS SANDS By John Borthwick

“Lovely scenery, quiet, pure air, clear sea water, and heavenly sunsets,” reckoned Robert Louis Stevenson when he holidayed at the Diamond Head end of Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach in 1893. You can still sense the beauty that he celebrated, albeit in clichés, even if a large hotel now squats where the Scottish author once mused. The waves still roll out of an ocean that’s as blue as a postcard’s promise but now there is a Legoland of some 35,000 hotel rooms looming before it.

bluebirds-1

sun-king

Take a walk with history for a couple of kilometres along the Waikiki shore and its smaller beaches and coves reveal a deeper self. I start with the folksy-corny and much photographed Hula Show at the Waikiki Shell. Since 1937, this free performance has packed ’em in with hula dancers swaying demurely (no lusty Tahitian-style groin-grinding here, please) to the strains of the matronly Royal Hawaiian Girls Glee Club. A century ago, manic repressive Christian missionaries almost succeeded in stamping out Hawaii’s supposedly obscene “hoola”. Today, the show’s finale, in which the lumbering Moms and Pops of Middle America – dressed in flowered mu-mus, socks and sandals – attempt the hula, suggests that the missionaries had at least an aesthetic point.

Waikiki means “spouting water.” In pre-colonial times, when lush with fishponds and food gardens, it was a haven for both royalty and commoners. With the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 by US business interests, the area degenerated until it was, according to one citizen, “most unsanitary and unsightly.” The mess of mosquito-riddled swamps was drained by the construction of Ala Wai Canal in 1922 and the rest, as they say, is real estate history.

Sugar-plumed swells roll shoreward all day. Long before haoles (Caucasians) came, Waikiki was a surfing mecca. Today, the break is a mosh-pit of kayaks, canoes, tandem malibus and a bulbous yellow catamaran. It’s hard to believe that surfing — he’enalu — nearly died out here by 1900 (thanks to the censorious missionaries) before it was revived by Honolulu locals, including Duke Paoa Kahanamoku (1890-1968), who spread surfboard riding around the world, including to Australia.

At a stretch of Waikiki known as Kuhio Park Beach, I watch the Duke’s descendants, Hawaiians of all ages and races, flinging themselves shoreward on body boards. Not far away stands a large bronze statue of the great waterman. When it was erected there were dark murmurings about why he had been stood — wrongly, in local opinion — with his back to the sea? The answer was simple, symbolic — photo-opportunism. The Duke was made to face inland so that Gidgets from Ginza and sand-challenged flatlanders from everywhere might frame themselves before him in an instant of surreal authenticity, with his once-regal beach as their backdrop. The Japanese love of Waikiki contributes greatly to its prosperity and the proliferation of surfers from Nippon, many with bleached blond hair, means that Honolulu Lulu, Queen of the Surfer Girls, today looks more like office lady, Yokohama Yoko.

With the presence of millions of domestic and international visitors each year Waikiki today is like a Surfers Paradise squared, a Cancun cubed. Its tsunami wall of accommodation glares back at the Pacific, an empire of balconies where everyone is Sun King, or Queen, for a day. New arrivals, fluorescent with first-day sunburn, weave amid a group of women struggling across the circus sands in high heels. A bikini-clad girl gets swamped in the shorebreak while nattering on her phone. Massive Hawaiian beach boys on equally massive boards dance like ninjas across lines of bluebird surf. Inescapable are the voluble, exclamatory haoles, often from inland mainland USA. “Are we on the island of Waikiki?” yells a conference escapee from Utah. A teenage Beavis emerges from his first dip in an ocean, hollering to his friends, “I got sand in my pockets! Hey, I got sand in muh butt-crack!”

I stroll north towards lunchtime, which presents me with the choice of the four essential local food groups — chilli dog, shave ice, burger or spam sushi. I settle for a sandwich. (And why not? The early British colonial name for Hawaii was the Sandwich Isles.) Munching, I fall into step with a surfer, Rocky who’s striding towards the reef break at Ala Moana. He’s a local, one of Waikiki’s 30,000 permanent residents. Like many people on Oahu Island, Rocky is a bitsa, “hapa” (half) this and that. As he says, “Hapa-Hawaiian, hapa-haole Portuguese, hapa-Chinese – you know, da kine, all-Hawaiian.”

There’s no mistaking the cochineal-pink confection I’m soon standing before, Waikiki’s most famous pile, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, a Moorish-Deco seraglio of colonnades and archways. A royal coconut grove of nearly 10,000 trees once stood here, along with the summer home of Queen Kaahumanu, a powerful, 19^th century Hawaiian regent. The 384-room Royal Hawaiian that sprouted in their place in 1927 was touted as the “finest resort hostelry in America”. Nearby, in the courtyard of the nearby Sheraton Moana Surfrider – known as the “First Lady” of Waikiki’s hotels – I relax under a huge banyan tree that is some 130 years old, with its branches spreading 50 metres.

In some places, Waikiki’s shore at high tide is no more than a few metres wide. With the sands regularly washing away, urban myths flourish about the source of their replenishment – everywhere from Florida to Port Kembla. The actual source is the nearby island of Molokai.

For early Hawaiians, the next section of Waikiki that I reach, now called Gray’s Beach, was a place of healing, of strong mana where the sick and injured came to be treated by kahuna physicians. Their beach is now much diminished in sand and probably mana, too, but soon it widens again at Fort DeRussy Beach, which is home to, of all things, a US Army Museum. This huge, anomalous structure was once a gun battery that the army tried to demolish in 1969 but the task proved almost impossible and so the building was turned into a museum.

Toe rings, tattoos, $29.99 aloha shirts, hula dolls and newbies surfing in sandshoes. Tourist culture reaches both its apogee and nadir in Waikiki. Alongside the tour groups is another set, the involuntarily transient, aka the homeless. Beached here in alleged “paradise”, they sleep beneath the trees of Fort DeRussy Park. Just behind them is a hotel, the aptly named Hale Koa (“the house of the warrior”) for US services personnel. Beefy military police attempt to blend in by patrolling the shore while jammed into a golf cart.

By Paoa Park at the northeastern end of Waikiki, I’ve walked sufficient history. The Hilton Hawaiian Village now sprawls where Duke Kahanamoku’s family once lived and the legendary waterman learned to swim in the old-fashioned way, by being thrown in to sink or conquer the world. Out on the reef, his heirs, Rocky and his pals are pulling into the snappy, left-hand barrels of Ala Moana reef.

Sunset is coming. Soon the balconies of those 30-storey hotels will erupt in a flashbulb fire fight of cameras straining to catch infinity in a 35mm frame. I find a bar-with-a-view, the Duke’s Canoe Club, and ponder why — amid the relentless spam of tourist culture — do rubbernecks like myself still make the trek to Waikiki? Then again, to sit below this lavish, cocktail syrup sunset in a place where the Duke once rode giant, bluebird waves and kahunas strode the earth, and still be asking “Why?” seems like missing the obvious.

Waikiki beach, Oahu Island, Hawaii

Copyright 2008. John Borthwick

All photos and text are world copyright John Borthwick and may not be reproduced, copied or retransmitted by any means.

More: http://www.waikikihistorictrail.com

A COLD LESSON IN NOSTALGIA: CONCRETE AND RUST ON THE BACK ROADS OF ROUTE 66 by David Latta

Back before design hotels perverted the concept of hospitality into look-at-me-ain’t-I-cool egotism, there were novelty hotels. You could place the tiki craze, with its flamboyant, rose-coloured hankering for the South Pacific, that caught on in the United States in the interwar years, firmly in this category. But there were other, often crazier examples that enlivened the novelty hotel market.

Very few remain, the victim of changing fashions and the newer-is-better mindset of modern times. It’s turned full circle with the retro craze, of course, but too little and too late to save some of the genuinely unique examples of long ago.

When I was plotting the course of a road trip through the US south-west some time back, the Wigwam Hotel in Holbrook, Arizona, was first on the list. It was part of the revered Route 66 of popular culture, the early 20th century highway that cut across the United States from Chicago to Los Angeles and provided an escape for the Dust Bowl refugees (sketched out by of Steinbeck and his ilk) towards a brighter future.

When Route 66 was dismantled and replaced by the soulless Interstates, the Mother Road faded into obscurity. These days, Holbrook is just off the I-40, a roundabout way east from Los Angles and just beyond Winslow, which has as about its only claim to fame being featured in an Eagles song, Take It Easy.

My first mistake was travelling in November. With winter approaching, the days were clear and sunny but with little warmth in the sun. At night, the temperature plummeted. I arrived in Holbrook after dark and checked in just before the motel’s office closed up tight like the town itself.

The Wigwam Hotel looks exactly like the old postcards. A circle of tall teepees made of concrete with a smattering of old long-abandoned cars that lends it a certain Twilight Zone je nes sa qua. Inside, the teepees were disarmingly spacious but the small heater had a hard time minimising the deepening chill.

The long drive had exhausted me and I soon fell into a deep sleep. Early in the morning, however, the bone-numbing cold etched its way into my dreams and eventually brought me awake. I put another blanket on the bed, then covered that with the contents of my suitcase. As snug as I could possibly be without crawling into the suitcase and zipping it up over me, I drifted back into a fitful sleep.

Not too long afterwards, the long agonized low notes of a freight train’s horn felt like it was sounding just outside the teepee. When I investigated, I found it was. The rear boundary of the Wigwam Motel is right next to the train tracks. If I was a trainspotter, I’d be in heaven. I wasn’t.

It was to be a valuable lesson in nostalgia. The Wigwam Hotel, just one of three surviving teepee motels left in the US and still operated by relatives of the original owner, is a must-stay. But, in winter, when it’s cocooning you need to endure long road trips, aim for an Embassy Suites or better and drop by the Wigwam for souvenirs and photos.

AN ETERNAL MAJESTY: THE HOTEL DEL CORONADO, SAN DIEGO’S MOST FAMOUS RESORT by David Latta

For many guests at The Del, as San Diego’s historic Hotel del Coronado is often known, their stay recalls the line from The Eagle’s Hotel California – you can check-out any time you like but you can’t ever leave.

This massive pile, opened in 1888 and today one of the largest wooden structures remaining from the grand era of late nineteenth century resort building in the United States (not surprisingly, most burnt down), is a place of mystery despite the resort ambience of its Pacific Ocean-front position. Ghost stories abound and, within minutes of setting foot inside, I’m drawn to asking the question that I’m sure the staff have heard a million times before.

I’m in the gift shop, just off the main lobby. Amongst the copious Marilyn Monroe memorabilia that fills this area almost to overflowing (Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy, Some Like It Hot, ranked by the American Film Institute as the funniest US movie of all time, was filmed at the Coronado), I ask a staff member if any of hotel’s ghosts cause problems.

“Heavens, yes,” she replies readily enough, although not without a touch of nervousness. “It constantly rearranges the shelves.” The saleslady seems exasperated by the extra work. It’s bad enough when the earthly visitors leave the place a mess, let along long-dead guests adding to the workload.

“It doesn’t like anything to do with Marilyn,” gazing back at the lunchboxes, fridge magnets and books to check they are still in a general sort of order.

The Coronado’s flesh-and-blood guests have long reported strange occurrences, from sudden plunges in temperature and ghostly footsteps to televisions and ceiling fans that turn on and off without warning.

The usual culprit is claimed to be Kate Morgan, a young woman who checked into the hotel in November 1892 and spent five days awaiting a lover who never arrived. She was found dead on an outside staircase with a bullet wound to the head. The San Diego Coroner ruled the death as suicide.

Kate is said to be still seen wandering the halls while guests in her room (Room 3327) report all manner of unexplained disturbances.

Thankfully, the Coronado is not exactly the Overlook Hotel. It’s a benign and most amazing building, designed in the Queen Anne revival style by Canadian architect James W. Reid, and dominated by a massive red turret.

Construction of what was envisaged as the grandest resort hotel in the United States began in March 1887. At its peak, some 2,000 workers toiled on this sandy wasteland but, when it opened the following year, it was an immediate success.

Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

It has somewhere around 675 guestrooms and dominates the southern end of Coronado, a peninsula that is linked by a 16 kilometre-long isthmus known as the Silver Strand to the San Diego mainland. At Coronado’s northern end is the sprawling Naval Air Station North Island, comprising some 35,000 personnel and 23 aviation squadrons.

From the early days of manned flight, North Island was an important aeronautic location. Before being commissioned as a Naval Air Station in 1917, it was the site of an aviation school that attracted trainee pilots from around the world. One such aviator was Sadayoshi Yamada, who rose through the ranks of the Japanese armed forces to become Vice Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II.

Over the years, the Hotel del Coronado has welcomed royalty, American presidents and movie stars. One of its most famous turns in the spotlight was during the filming of Some Like It Hot, which used the beachfront and hotel exteriors to great effect (the interiors were recreated in the Culver City, Los Angeles, studios of MGM).

Another famous guest was Frank L. Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz series of books. Although from the East Coast, he was drawn to California’s more welcoming climate. He spent months at a time at the Coronado between 1904 and 1910, after which he built a home in Hollywood that he named Ozcot.

The Coronado also inspired novelist Richard Mathieson (whose 1954 novel, I Am Legend, has been filmed four times, the last with Will Smith in 2007) to create Bid Time Return (1975), that deftly interweaves a love story with time travel. When it was filmed as Somewhere In Time (1980), with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, the setting was changed to the equally-elegant Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan.

Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis during filming of Some Like It Hot at the Hotel del Coronado

However, one of the most interesting connections with the Hotel del Coronado is actually one that could have happened but didn’t. When Bessie Wallis Warfield married Earl Winfield Spenser Jr. – an aviator and lieutenant in the United States Navy – in 1916, no-one could have foretold the effect it would have on the world.

Win, as he was known, was posted to San Diego in 1917 to oversee the establishment of the nation’s first naval air base. Wallis, as she was known, was the dutiful but ultimately unhappy military wife of a dissatisfied and alcoholic officer, a woman who loved to entertain and be entertained.

On 7 April 1920, the Hotel del Coronado hosted a ball in honour of Edward, Prince of Wales, who had arrived aboard the British warship HMS Renown en route to a royal tour of Australia. In later years, Win himself recalled he was on hand that evening with his wife who was introduced to the Prince.

Such is the cachè of such a momentous meeting that it has passed, unchecked, into popular legend. Even the Coronado’s website states that many have speculated that “they may have first met at The Del”. However, as Anne Sebba reveals in That Woman: The Life Of Wallis Simpson, Duchess Of Windsor (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2011), the reality is more like the golden opportunity that never occurred.

Several days before the ball, Wallis left San Diego for San Francisco to visit a socialite friend and didn’t return until the week following. This is confirmed by newspaper social columns of both cities.

It would be another 11 years before Wallis finally met the Prince. In the interim, Wallis divorced Spenser in 1927, moved to England and married Ernest Simpson in 1928. She met the Prince at a country house party in 1931 and they became involved sometime around 1934. He ascended the throne as King Edward VIII in January 1936, Wallis and Simpson divorced in October 1936, and Edward abdicated in December of that year. In June 1937, Edward and Wallis married.

And the rest, as they say, even in the character-saturated hallways of the Hotel del Coronado, is history.

Main photo courtesy of the Hotel del Coronado. Other photos copyright MGM