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In the mid-Twenties, the giant Matson Navigation Company commissioned the construction of a luxurious new passenger liner, the Malolo, to bring wealthy tourists to Hawaii. In need of an equally luxurious destination, the company then undertook to build the finest hotel in the Pacific. The prestigious New York architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore was called in, and construction of Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel began in 1925. Couched in the superlatives so beloved by writers of the Twenties, it was the largest construction project in the Pacific up to that time, consuming 35,000 barrels of concrete, 75 miles of wire, 50 tons of stucco, and 9000 gallons of paint, stain, and lacquer, not to mention some four million dollars of Matson’s capital. The result was this towering, vaguely Mission Revival confection whose rose-colored paint scheme quickly earned it the nickname of The Pink Palace. Twelve hundred guests attended the hotel’s grand opening on February 1, 1927, to be entertained by a Hawaiian pageant which the Honolulu Star-Bulletin described as “colorful and semi-barbaric”. Nowadays, overshadowed by surrounding highrises and with its original entrance obscured by a 1970s-era shopping center, the hotel remains a quaint reminder of a scale of building that Hawaiians once considered gigantic.
Douglas Keister