As Honolulu’s flagship entertainment venue marks its 50th-anniversary year with celebration concerts, including a nostalgic performance tonight by the Beach Boys, city officials are facing a hard truth: The Neal S. Blaisdell Center needs to be replaced.
The complex, which includes an arena, concert hall and exhibition center, has been a focal point for Hawaii residents since it opened in 1964.
The arena hosted some of the biggest acts in entertainment history, from Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones to Frank Sinatra. It’s also been the backdrop for such community milestones as high school graduations, the Kamehameha Schools Song Contest and numerous athletic championships.
But its days are numbered.
"It’s an aged facility," said Tracy Kubota, deputy director of the Department of Enterprise Services, which oversees the center. "It’s a 50-year-old structure. How much more can we get out of it? We can make do, but we just don’t know when something large enough will happen to put us offline."
More than age, the arena’s size and shape are vexing concerns.
With about 7,000 seats for a concert, it is too small for many touring acts, said John Fuhrmann, events and services administrator of the Blaisdell complex. The size puts entertainers in a bind.
"We work very hard to bring in the shows that we do and have to do multiple dates to do that," he said. "It’s very difficult to get acts to come over here to do that. Rather than do one show, they have to do two or three to make the economics work."
An arena with 12,000 to 14,000 seats would be a more attractive venue, he said.
The shape also needs to be changed and enlarged. Instead of the circular design, which was dubbed "a gigantic white mushroom" as construction was winding down, a new arena should be more of an oblong building, he said.
Ideally, it would stretch 240 feet between its farthest points, much larger than Blaisdell’s 185-foot diameter, Fuhrmann said.
"It makes it easier to do different kinds of things," he said. "Everything, from minor league hockey, even. I can’t do that in the building now because you couldn’t see the goals at the end."
And because the arena was built primarily as a sports venue, the dressing rooms are really locker rooms in disguise, forcing officials to move in furniture and other VIP amenities to please pampered performers.
There’s no cost estimate for a new facility or a wish list of amenities, but the timing of when it would be built is the stickiest problem, according to Fuhrmann.
"I wouldn’t want to put a bulldozer at one end and roll it through to the other end and start building again," he said. "There are more arenas in the United States than shows touring. If you lose your place in line, it requires more effort to bring a show in."
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s fiscal year 2015 budget plan, which is due to the City Council by March 1, will include an as-yet-unspecified amount to fund a master plan for the site, said Jesse Broder Van Dyke, city spokesman.
Kubota said size will be a key part of planning discussions.
"We aren’t going to build something that is too big for Hawaii," she said. "If we overbuild and overdevelop it, it will be a waste. If we build something that is too huge, it won’t be flexible enough to be used as a smaller facility."
AS EVEN as the city looks forward to a modern complex, the 50th-anniversary year at the Blaisdell will be a time to savor nostalgic moments in its history.
Concertgoers attending tonight’s performance by the Beach Boys will receive anniversary souvenirs and, for the first 30 minutes of the show, be able to buy a hot dog and a soda at 1964 prices — 75 cents.
This spring the city plans to host a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of the first performance in the arena, the "Million Dollar Party" held April 10, 1964. That concert featured Bobby Rydell, Teddie Randazzo, Jan and Dean, Johnny Crawford, and Paul Revere & the Raiders.
All of it was a very big deal at the time, from the performers to the building that The Honolulu Advertiser called "a 20th-century pleasure dome."
Originally named the Honolulu International Center, it was the biggest, fanciest facility of its kind in Hawaii.
It was the dream of then-Mayor Neal Blaisdell, who led the city during five terms. Blaisdell viewed the complex as a multipurpose facility that functioned as both a convention center and a place for the community.
The city renamed it in his honor in 1976, not long after he died.
The HIC, as most everyone called it, cost $14.4 million. Among the features that received praise were a sound system with "stereo effect," padded seats (instead of wooden benches) and "a four-sided scoreboard designed for any indoor sport."
When it was formally dedicated in September 1964, the city celebrated the achievement with nine days of entertainment. It quickly became the place where Honolulu audiences saw their favorite music stars up close for the first time.
Fuhrmann, who has worked at the Blaisdell since 1980, said the complex has done everything it was supposed to do and fulfilled Blaisdell’s vision for bringing top-notch entertainment to Honolulu. But that won’t continue without serious change.
"It has grown and served its time well," Fuhrmann said. "Going forward, to successfully accomplish the same kind of pattern of growth and success for this community, we will have to redo and rebuild everything here."
