Ala Moana Center found home amid 50 acres of swampland

Saturday marks the 52nd anniversary of Ala Moana Center’s grand opening. It was the beginning of a revolution in Honolulu’s shopping scene.

In 1959 downtown Honolulu had been the main shopping area for well more than 100 years. Locals flocked downtown to shop at Liberty House, McInerny, Andrade, Kress, Ming’s and the Ritz. Ala Moana was mostly swampland.

Former Honolulu Star-Bulletin Editor Bud Smyser recalled "the alarm in the downtown business community on learning a giant shopping center was planned for Ala Moana. Downtowners feared it could decimate downtown retailing." They were right.

Sears was the anchor tenant that paved the way for smaller stores to follow. If a giant like Sears could do it, they could take the chance, too, they felt.

One week before the territory became a state on Aug. 21, 1959, Ala Moana Center held its grand opening. Phase I was the Ewa wing of the center. A crowd of more than 1,000 stood on the upper deck, outside the area between Longs and Sears.

Walter Dillingham and his son Lowell, Gov. William Quinn and Mayor Neal S. Blaisdell welcomed the crowd.

Actors portraying King Kalakaua and Queen Kapiolani arrived in a horse-drawn carriage with six princesses and a chamberlain, all in authentic costumes.

Walter Dillingham hailed Kalakaua during the ceremony as Hawaii’s first "merchant king." He and his son Lowell then presented the king and queen with a hookupu, or gift of calabash bowls, filled with items from the land, sea and sky.

Musical and hula groups performed on three stages during the day and into the night. A 40-foot maile lei was cut allowing the public to enter the center for the first time.

The open-air mall had two levels and encompassed 680,000 leasable square feet of space. A two-level parking deck could accommodate more than 4,000 cars. It cost only $25 million to build, and 87 tenants moved in, including Longs, Foodland, Woolworth, Slipper House, HOPACO, Carol & Mary, McInerny, Pocketbook Man, Sears, Shirokiya and Iida’s.

Walter Dillingham purchased the 50 acres of swampland in 1912 for $25,000 (about $560,000 in today’s dollars) figuring "it might be useful someday." For 25 years it sat unused.

Donald Graham, a vice president at the Hawaiian Land Co., took the lead in the mall’s design. His signature attraction was a UFO-shaped revolving restaurant. It first showed up in design plans in 1952 — in the middle of the shopping center. "We moved it all over the place," Graham recalls, before finally placing La Ronde atop an office building on the mauka side of the center.

Today Ala Moana Center is the world’s largest outdoor shopping center with more than 200 stores and 70 restaurants occupying 2 million square feet. In 1998 it was the first mall in the U.S. to reach $1 billion in annual sales.

Bob Sigall, author of "The Companies We Keep" books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.