The Welcome Tower, Back From Five Years Away
Honolulu's Aloha Tower opens its observation deck again today, the day before its 100th birthday. It was built to greet ships. The ships left first.
Today at 10:30 a.m. Honolulu's Aloha Tower reopens its observation deck with a blessing ceremony, and tomorrow evening the state throws it a centennial party with a drone show, Hawaii News Now reports. The deck has been shut since the pandemic. Ten floors up, with a view of the harbor the tower was built to introduce.
It opened in 1926, for $160,000, as a welcome for passengers coming in by ship, and for a few decades it did exactly that. On Boat Day lei sellers worked the pier, hula dancers performed, swimmers dove for coins and the Royal Hawaiian Band played the liners in. The tower was also the tallest building in Hawaii at the time, 184 feet. Denby Fawcett, writing in Civil Beat, remembers her father printing “Tallest building in Hawaii” on his stationery, which reportedly made his New York contacts laugh.
Then the thing it welcomed stopped coming. In late 1959 Qantas and Pan Am began flying Boeing 707s, taking a West Coast trip from about nine hours to under five. In 1970 Matson ended its passenger service to Honolulu. The tower was now a lighthouse for a business that had moved to the airport.
The 1989 plan to fix that is where it gets funny. A group working with the developer James Rouse won the right to redevelop the waterfront with a $544 million plan and a promise of about $4 billion in lease revenue over 65 years. The Aloha Tower Marketplace opened in 1994 at a cost of $95 million. The developers declared bankruptcy in 1997. A 2010 state audit found the Marketplace had been projected to bring in $22.2 million from 1996 to 2001 and delivered $4.8 million. Honolulu magazine called it a “sadly underwhelming ghost mall.”
Today a university owns the Marketplace and uses it as student housing, and a state audit last year said it has to pay at least $1 million a year to the agency that manages the site. The tower itself never did anything wrong. It's 100 years old, it's in the same spot, and it's still there to greet whoever shows up.
Buenos Aires has one of these too, the Torre Monumental over the port at Retiro, a clock tower the British community gave the city in 1916. It was called the Torre de los Ingleses until 1982, when the name stopped being convenient.