With the community’s eyes soon to be sharply focused on Honolulu Hale for the Christmas season, it seems appropriate to write about this important historic building since, besides the holiday gaiety, what goes on inside it affects most of our daily lives.
The fun kicks off with Honolulu City Lights on Saturday. At night, the entire exterior of the building is ablaze with lights and decorations, a giant Christmas tree, and jolly Santa and his Mrs.
But don’t just cruise by in your car. Go inside because it is an awe-inspiring sight. Practically every railing, chandelier, light fixture and open wall is draped with some sort of holiday swag. And the courtyard is filled with dozens of decorated Christmas trees. The trees are entered by each city department in a competition, and it can be lots of fun looking over the creativity from engineers and accountants and firefighters and police, and on and on.
If you can see beyond the shiny Christmas balls, artificial greenery and snow hut, and dozens of department trees, you’ll note the courtyard space is quite big: 90-square-foot floor area with a 55-foot-tall ceiling. It was open to the sky originally but was covered with a retractable roof in 1986 after numerous city hall events were rained out over the years.
The ceiling itself is worth a long look. The frescoes were hand-painted by famed Los Angeles artist Einar Peterson and they show traditional designs of southwest Native Americans. Why Native Americans is anybody’s guess, especially since the ceiling he did in the Council Chambers in the same building is of Native Hawaiians at work and play. Peterson also did much of the decorative work in the iconic Alexander & Baldwin Building on Bishop Street.
Honolulu Hale was designed by an architectural consortium led by notables C.W. Dickey and Hart Wood. The building officially opened right around this time of year in 1929 and the original structure (without the two wings added in the 1950s) cost $750,000.
The courtyard’s four distinct chandeliers and some of the decorative light fixtures were hand-crafted in San Francisco. Cleverly, Dickey and Wood had the foresight to construct the chandeliers (each weighs 500 pounds) with a built-in winch system so they can be cleaned and re-bulbed when necessary.
Sections of the interior walls have their own charm. You will see carved detailing in the coral and sandstone columns, balconies and entrances. They are the artistry of noted Italian sculptor Mario Valdastri, who lived in Honolulu for decades.
It is said the building exemplifies the Mediterranean influences in the California Mission style seen in many Honolulu structures after annexation and be- fore World War II. It was reported that Dickey and Wood recognized the "regional appropriateness" of the Mission vernacular to Hawaii’s climate and lifestyle. They apparently weren’t the only ones to make that discovery.
Consider the other downtown buildings constructed about this time with some of the same Mediterranean styling (which is said to be a mix of Italian, Spanish and French elements): the Post Office, 1922; the YWCA, 1927; the former YMCA (now the State Art Museum), 1928; and the News Building, 1929.
"An imposing pile of stuccoed masonry, (Honolulu Hale’s) commanding eight-story tower and three massive bronze entry portals provide a strong statement for public respect, if not awe and civic pride," the book "Hart Wood: Architectural Regionalism in Hawaii" says about the building.
As stated at the beginning, within that pile of masonry and beyond the glitz of Christmas reside the two most powerful agencies in the city: the mayor’s office, the City Council chambers and offices of the Council members. They really do determine a good deal of our fate.
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Keep Hawaii Hawaii is a monthly column on island architecture and urban planning. Robert M. Fox, president of Fox Hawaii Inc., studied architecture in California and Japan. He was one of the founders of the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation in 1974. 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 keephawaiihawaii@staradvertiser.com.
