Move from downtown gave nuns site with art deco charm

As you approach the front of the art deco building that now houses the Hawaii Baptist Academy elementary school at Nuuanu and Bates, your eyes can’t miss the nearly 15-foot-high grand entry doors of carved koa. It’s hard to think of others like them anywhere else in Honolulu.

Those doors and the two-story building they lead to was originally built as a Catholic convent and girls elementary school in 1938. That date pins the building design squarely in the age of art deco, which is the period between the two world wars.

Why the convent/school was located at Nuuanu and Bates is an interesting story. It is about congestion.

The Sisters of the Sacred Heart arrived on Honolulu’s shores in 1859 and promptly erected a convent/school next to the Our Lady of Peace Cathedral on Fort Street. They expanded the convent/school in increments until the building was big enough to accommodate hundreds of young day students, rooms for boarders and, of course, convent housing. It was here, according to the Catholic Herald, that “generation after generation of Honolulu’s finest girls received not only a solid education in secular learning, but also a practical Catholic training.”

But gradually things changed in the area surrounding the convent. In describing the move away from Fort Street after nearly 80 years the Catholic Herald stated, “When in 1859 the Sisters of the Sacred Heart established themselves in Honolulu, the actual town was but a sparse port, hardly visited and almost unknown to the rest of the world.” This article goes on to complain that years later, “Honolulu has become a great and beautiful city among restless traffic … but it unfortunately has lost the charm, the calm, the wholesome pure air that it once possessed.”

So around 1933, the sisters started to look for a new location near town that would provide “the conditions of silent peace, of a vivifying atmosphere necessary to hundreds of children.” They found such a location in the old 10-acre Baldwin Estate at Nuuanu and Bates.

If in fact the sisters conducted all the transactions themselves, they were a pretty shrewd bunch because they sold the congested Fort Street location that “lacked wholesome air” for $250,000 and turned around and built a brand new 30,000-square-foot convent and school for nearly the same amount. The new location was where the sisters hoped to add “greater zest” to their regular curriculum.

Architect Claude Albon Stiehl, who later designed the Church of the Crossroads, provided the sisters with a two-story functional building that nicely fits these brief descriptions of art deco: “a simple box could be decorated with motifs and embellishments with appendages,” and “classic art deco is rectangular block forms in geometric fashion that is then broken up with ornamental elements.” At the Nuuanu convent some columns have serrated designs and others have long ribbed patterns. Artful screens can be seen running along the wall of a lovely interior courtyard and much the same design can be seen repeated in various entryways.

A contemporary architect described what the sisters got in their building as “restrained” art deco. And one cannot forget the design element of those massive wooden front doors mentioned earlier.

Big as those carved doors are (about 9 feet of a total 15-foot expanse of wood and each is 4 feet wide), they open effortlessly. They center the main building and once one passes through them a big, lovely grassy and tree laden courtyard opens up, framed on three sides by wings on either ends of the front building. The left wing, as in the original, is all classrooms; the right wing houses meeting rooms and a peaceful chapel, art rooms and other instructional spaces. The front building includes offices.

An obvious question is, so if this was a Catholic convent and school, how did it convert to a Baptist school?

For many years the sisters operated Sacred Hearts Academy on Waialae Avenue. By the mid-1980s, they made a decision to consolidate their Nuuanu and Kaimuki campuses. At about the same time the Baptists felt hemmed in by their small, congested elementary school on Nehoa in Makiki since church-owned land stretching down to the next street had been leased to a developer who built the Mott-Smith Laniloa condominium.

To sell the Nuuanu convent was not easy for the sisters. Such a sale had to be approved by the Vatican since the appraised value had zoomed to $18 million over the years. But over those same years an ecumenical relationship had built up between the two faiths since across Bates Street from the Catholic convent was an active Baptist church. Apparently the sisters and the Baptist parishioners together enjoyed special programs, concerts and plays.

A key player in the transaction between the two churches was Baptist businessman Dick Bento, whose daughter attended the Baptist school on Nehoa. Even though the sisters had been offered much more than the appraised value, in the end Bento and the sisters negotiated a $12 million purchase in 1987 for the Nuuanu-Bates property. It was a winner all the way around. Fundraising for the purchase was a huge challenge and Bento was in the thick of it.

The end of this story is that Bento, after his successful business career, spent more than 30 years at the Hawaii Baptist schools and ended up as head of school for the Baptist high and middle schools on Wyllie and the elementary school at Nuuanu and Bates. He retires in a few months.

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Keep Hawaii Hawaii is a monthly column on island architecture and urban planning. David Cheever, owner of David Cheever Marketing, has served on the boards of the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation and the Hawaii Architectural Foundation. Send comments to keephawaii hawaii@staradvertiser.com.