Making the rounds upon becoming president of Hawaii Pacific University, Geoffrey Bannister told then-Mayor Peter Carlisle in the summer of 2011 "that I was new to town, that if anything was coming up that looked interesting, he’d probably hear about it before I did, and I asked him to let me know."

Bannister says Carlisle told him that he "had a project in mind and he’d have the developer call me, and it was Aloha Tower," within walking distance from HPU’s Fort Street Mall classrooms.

Carlisle said the plan for the rail system’s station at Bishop Street enhanced an HPU campus extension, and he was aware that Bannister has a background in urban planning, recalled the HPU president.

"Apparently, the kids were having this problem of staying over in Waikiki, which wasn’t conducive to the type of academic environment that was to their greatest benefit," Carlisle said. "It was very clear to me that this would be a very, very good place along the rail line."

In a short time, Bannister put together a plan to turn the second floor of the Aloha Tower shops into housing for more than 320 students, resident advisers or lecturers and build a full-size gymnasium for basketball, volleyball and special events, with flexible seating, mauka of the tower. The plan includes turning the former Hawaii Maritime Center into an HPU faculty club and alumni center and extended parking near the marketplace.

The $34 million makeover is scheduled to be completed in 2015 by HPU, which will have full ownership and control of the marketplace, according to approval granted in January by the Aloha Tower Development Corp., the state agency that owns the land under the marketplace.

Fruition of those plans will take the prime waterfront site, with its iconic Aloha Tower, into the next chapter of a very-storied development tale, which started with big state dreams and has been full of controversial fits and starts.

The Aloha Tower Development Corp. (ATDC) was created in 1981 by the state Legislature to develop the tower’s surroundings, which were envisaged — but never produced in full — as a marketplace of shops, offices and a hotel, then plans for two condo towers, an office tower and a business hotel.

What was limited to the marketplace — alongside a resurrected Pier 10 cruise terminal — struggled through more than three decades and four expensive lawsuits. The state auditor recommended in 2010 that the ATDC be abolished. Instead, the Legislature moved a trimmed-down version of the corporation to the state Department of Transportation’s Harbors Division in 2011.

HPU’s plan "really redefines the space," said Karl Kim, an urban and regional planning professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

"In general," Kim said, "it seems like a good idea to try to introduce a diversity of uses and to use university campuses as an engine of economic development in urban areas. I think that creates more activities, more uses, more reason for people to go there with the improved transportation access.

"We do know that with rail, there is going to be an intensification of activity around the stations," Kim added, "so it would be interesting to see how this fits into the larger plans for the area," including the Hawaii Community Development Authority’s vision for the larger Kakaako district.

The HCDA, created in 1976, and the ATDC both were born amid lofty state hopes of revitalizing urban areas and transforming underutilized acreage into vibrant commercial hubs for residents and tourists. In recent years, the HCDA has been especially vigorous in approving a spate of new condo and housing projects, given a prominent jumpstart by Gov. Neil Abercrombie who welcomed developers to bid to build the state’s tallest tower at 690 Pohukaina. The ATDC, in stark contrast, sputters along after more than three decades and dashed deals with some half-dozen developers.

In calling for a legislative audit in 2008, lawmakers said "the Aloha Tower Development Corporation has only entered into (development agreements) that have stalled, vitiated, or otherwise eviscerated development plans for the area."

(See timeline below for highlights of the site’s controversies.)

The Aloha Tower Marketplace’s history created "a certain skepticism" by Bannister, although briefly.

"I did my master’s degree on retail store location so it wasn’t too surprising," Bannister said. He considered past problems of the Aloha Tower Marketplace but concluded that the attempt to restrict it to shops and restaurants was a mistake.

"I looked at the property, the parking, the transportation, the auxiliary use around it," he said. "It didn’t take a genius to spot that it’s not an easy location for what people were trying to do, and in an Internet age it just got harder.

"We wouldn’t be dependent entirely on bricks-and-mortar retail in an Internet age," Bannister said, predicting that students and faculty would create "a much more stable income stream than retail would have at this point." The gym would bring more people to the marketplace, he added.

"We know there’s a lot of demand from high school sports and for other groups looking for a facility that will hold around 1,500 to 2,000 people," he said.

The retail shop area was 70 percent vacant last year and "that’s probably dropped even a little bit since," said Todd Simmons, HPU’s vice-president of communications and marketing whose office is at Aloha Tower Marketplace. However, he said the university has been contacted by a number of potential tenants "who see the potential of a residential student market as well as many other thousands of students" along with faculty, staff, parents, friends, visitors and residents regularly attending activities in the gymnasium at the complex.

"For us, that’s really one of the more exciting dimensions of this," Simmons said. While HPU now lacks its own gymnasium, the one to be built next to Aloha Tower "would have flexible seating so that you could rearrange the room for things like big academic lectures, musical and theatrical performances, community gatherings."

That agenda could contribute to a result in what HPU is confident will be success that never happened with only shops and restaurants.

"One thing we know from an urban planning perspective," said Professor Kim, "the more activity and the more diversity of activity that you can generate, the greater sense of vitality a place has."