How Hawaii Became Hawaii

It's Sunday, September twentieth. My older brother and his fiancée got back from Hawaii last week. They stayed near Waikiki Beach, and when I asked him what it was like, he said the same thing everyone says: it felt like Vegas on a beach. Hawaii gets nearly ten million visitors a year, and almost all of them end up on the same two-mile stretch of sand in Honolulu. But Waikiki — the beach, the hotels, the whole thing — was not a beach until humans made it one. It was a swamp. What turned a mosquito-infested wetland into the most famous beach on Earth was steamships, a pink hotel, a drainage ditch, and the jet engine.

For most of Hawaiian history, Waikiki was not for tourists. It was for the aliʻi (ah-LEE-ee) — the Hawaiian ruling class. Kamehameha (kah-MAY-ah-MAY-ah) the Great lived there — he was the king who unified all the Hawaiian Islands under one rule for the first time, in the early 1800s. The trade winds kept it cool, the fishponds and taro fields produced food, and the surf was good.

The name Waikiki means "spouting water" — which makes sense, because the whole area was a wetland. Streams from the mountain valleys emptied into it. The whole place was rice paddies, taro fields, and fishponds, separated from the ocean by a narrow barrier beach. Mosquitoes thrived. Nobody was building hotels on a swamp.

Tourism barely existed. In the late 1800s, a handful of wealthy travelers passed through on months-long voyages. Mark Twain visited in 1866. A few small bathhouses along the beach offered overnight rooms for the adventurous few who made it that far. When Hawaii became a US territory in 1898, the groundwork for tourism was already being laid — not by hoteliers, but by a shipping company.

Captain William Matson was a Swedish-born sea captain. In 1882, he sailed his three-masted schooner from San Francisco to Hilo carrying three hundred tons of food and plantation supplies. That voyage launched Matson Navigation Company. For the next two decades, Matson's ships moved sugar and pineapples from Hawaii to the mainland and brought manufactured goods back. Passengers were an afterthought.

In 1908, Matson launched a steamship called the Lurline (lur-LEEN). It had room for 51 passengers, and the trip from San Francisco to Honolulu took four and a half days. Wealthy Americans who had never seen the Pacific suddenly had a way to get there in comfort. Around the same time, an English businessman opened the first real hotel on Waikiki Beach — the Moana. It had seventy-five rooms, each with a private bath and a telephone, plus the island's first electric elevator. Guests gathered on the wide front porch in the afternoons, looking out at Diamond Head and the surf.

The Moana was a gamble. Honolulu had just burned down part of Chinatown to control a bubonic plague outbreak that killed seventy people. Hawaii's political future was uncertain. The hotel lost money and was sold within two years. But the new owners expanded it, and it became the anchor of Waikiki tourism. For more than two decades, it was the only serious hotel on the beach.

Then, in the 1920s, Matson decided to get into the hotel business. The company had been watching its passengers arrive in Honolulu with nowhere appropriately luxurious to stay. So Matson bought the local hotel company, demolished an existing property, and hired the architecture firm that designed Grand Central Terminal to build something extraordinary.

Before you could build a luxury hotel district on a swamp, you had to get rid of the swamp. In 1921, the Hawaiian Dredging Company began digging a two-mile-long artificial waterway called the Ala Wai (AH-lah WHY) Canal. It diverted the streams that had fed the wetlands for millennia. It took seven years. When it was finished in 1928, the wetlands dried up. Waikiki was no longer "spouting water." It was ready for concrete.

While the dredges were still running, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel opened on February 1, 1927. Four million dollars. Six stories, four hundred rooms, pink stucco concrete, Spanish-Moorish arches, fifteen acres of landscaped gardens. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin called it "the first resort hostelry in America."

The opening was a black-tie gala. Twelve hundred guests. The Honolulu Symphony played. Dinner was ten dollars a plate. Guests nicknamed it the Pink Palace of the Pacific. Clark Gable stayed there. Shirley Temple, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe — they all came.

Matson's strategy was simple. Its white ships brought passengers from San Francisco and Los Angeles. Its hotels housed them when they arrived. And its marketing department hired famous photographers and commissioned artists to create images of hula dancers, outrigger canoes, Diamond Head, and impossibly blue water. The Hawaii of the American imagination was invented in Matson's marketing department before most Americans ever set foot there.

By 1928, a year after the Royal Hawaiian opened, Hawaii counted more than twenty thousand visitors for the first time.

From 1935 to 1975, a radio show called "Hawaii Calls" broadcast live from the Moana Hotel's Banyan Court. The host would open each episode by reading the air and water temperatures — which were often the exact same number — followed by the sound of waves. Millions of Americans who had never been to Hawaii heard it on their radios every week for forty years.

World War II interrupted everything. Matson's white ships were requisitioned by the government, painted navy gray, and used as troop transports. Ships designed for a few hundred passengers were packed with thousands of soldiers. After the war, the Lurline returned to service in 1948 after a twenty-million-dollar refit. But the real transformation was already on the horizon, and it was not coming by sea.

In 1959, three things happened that changed Hawaii permanently.

First, on August 21st, Hawaii became the fiftieth state. Statehood removed the psychological and bureaucratic friction that had made the islands feel foreign. No passports, no customs, no currency exchange.

Second, Boeing 707 jet service began. A flight from the West Coast now took about five hours instead of four and a half days by ship. The price dropped. The time dropped. The number of people who could get there exploded.

Third, Matson sold its four Waikiki hotels — the Moana, the Royal Hawaiian, and two others — to Sheraton. The shipping company had seen the future and wanted out. Mass-market hotel chains wanted in.

The numbers tell the rest. In 1959, Hawaii had roughly a quarter-million visitors. By 1967, it hit one million. By 1970, when the first Boeing 747 jumbo jet arrived, visitors arriving by sea were less than one-half of one percent of the total. In 1978, the last Matson white ship sailed. That same year, airline deregulation let carriers set their own prices, and fares dropped again.

By 1988, Hawaii was getting six million visitors a year. At its peak in the early 1990s, Japanese tourists alone topped two million annually — driven by Japan's economic bubble and the fact that a 747 could land five hundred people in Honolulu in about eight hours from Tokyo. The construction crane became known as the state bird.

In 2019, before the pandemic, Hawaii recorded ten point four million visitors. Tourism supports more than two hundred thousand jobs and accounts for roughly a fifth of the state's economy. Waikiki alone contains forty-five percent of all visitor accommodations in the state.

Waikiki Beach today gets most of its sand from other places. Erosion has been eating the beach for decades, so the state periodically pumps sand in from offshore deposits. The original beach, the one the aliʻi walked on, is mostly gone — buried under imported sand, hotel foundations, and an inexplicable number of ABC Stores. The Ala Wai Canal, the ditch that made it all possible, is now one of the most polluted waterways in Hawaii, its sediment laced with mercury from decades of boat paint and its water regularly exceeding federal bacteria limits. The white ships are gone. The pink palace is still there, but it's surrounded by glass towers.

My brother said Waikiki reminded him of Vegas, and once you know the history, it's not a bad comparison. Both are unlivable land that a handful of companies turned into a fantasy — one drained a swamp, the other diverted a river three hundred miles to flood a desert. My brother and his fiancée had a great time. They walked past the Moana's front porch, where the radio show used to broadcast. They saw a lot of concrete. They probably paid thirty dollars for a mai tai. And if anyone told them Waikiki used to be a swamp, they'd probably laugh. But it's true. It was drained by a ditch, sold by a shipping company, and filled in by the jet age.