Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!
Located in a volcanic crater, Punchbowl is a distinctive cemetery, and now it has a new administration office and visitor center to match that character.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is putting finishing touches this week on a new 7,462-square-foot building that’s perched on a hillside on Puowaina Drive outside the main gate of the veterans cemetery.
“Punchbowl is a unique location to start with. But this location and just the architecture of the new building really makes it a standout, and the community should be very proud,” Jim Horton, director of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, said Monday.
The two-story building on seven acres is built on 123 concrete piers that are 25 to 60 feet long and 3 feet in diameter, said Joshua Mathis, resident engineer on the project for the VA.
The dropoff behind the building provides expansive views of Diamond Head, Waikiki and downtown. An unusual, inverted “V”-shaped roof minimizes the obstruction for neighboring homes above the structure.
Gene Maestas, a Punchbowl spokesman, said the desire to provide more columbarium niche spaces for cremated ashes drove the office relocation. The new columbarium court 13 with
6,860 niches took the place of the old offices just inside the 116-acre cemetery grounds.
“Literally, we ran out of space two weeks after we just completed columbarium court 13,” Maestas said. “Now that allows us to continue to serve the veteran population for the next 10 years.”
The old offices were in a former caretaker’s quarters built in 1949. The two bedrooms became the offices of the director and administration officer, Maestas said.
The cemetery has 13,120 niches in columbarium courts 1 through 12. Opened in 1949, Punchbowl has just under 30,000 grave sites with about 38,000 individuals buried there, Maestas said.
As such, the cemetery is mostly full for in-ground burials, but graves do sometimes open when World War II and Korean War service members buried as “unknowns” are exhumed and identified as a result of scientific advances. Punchbowl also retains three grave sites for service members killed in action.
Reflecting the troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, no active-
duty service members killed in action have been buried in the cemetery in at least 3-1/2 years.
The new building is part of a nearly $30 million project started in 2015 to create the new columbarium space and new offices and to build a memorial wall.
Just seven of Punchbowl’s 27 employees will work in the new building, which will be a hub for visitors, families and cemetery representatives who assist with interments, officials said.
Horton said the cemetery can have up to seven services a day.
“As much as people think it’s a closed cemetery or that we’re full, we are still very, very active, interring veterans and their spouses,” Horton said.
A visitor center room, not yet outfitted, will provide information to find a particular grave site and will allow Punchbowl to “tell the story of different groups of veterans who are interred up in Punchbowl,” whether they’re nisei veterans, Pearl Harbor casualties or the “unknowns” that are increasingly being disinterred by the Pentagon, Horton said.
Horton said no tour buses will be allowed to pull in at the new building. Street parking also was added for Puowaina residents. Ohia trees are planted out front as part of vegetation that’s all native Hawaiian, Mathis said. Large rocks in the front of the building are representative of the islands.
“We’re truly blessed, and I think this is going to provide an opportunity for many years to come for the veterans here in Hawaii,” Maestas said.
73
