 Welcome back to our show Human Humane Architecture here on early Tuesday evenings here in a wonderful downtown Honolulu. So today our show will be called Honolulu's International Marketplace CIS. Yes, right, because there are two. Yes, and our guest is DeSoto Brown. How do you do? How do you do out there? At the Bishop Museum. Yes, I am. Thank you for being here. This is awesome. I look very much forward to the show and I'm going to keep it short and sweet as far as my part of it. Okay. But my little introduction would be then when you will take the audience along on your amazing narrative. Okay. I want them to maybe have in the back of your mind something that has to do with the show's name, which is humane. Right. And one of the definitions of humane is tolerant. Intolerant, we can say, has something to do with the very sort of common term is inclusive. True. So I want the audience to please think about the inclusiveness of the first or the other one. Right. And then because some people say in our host partner and colleague Kali Akina always reminds me that he thinks that his culture has always been inclusive from the very beginning. And I think that's true. So hopefully we get some five minutes to do our little bit of reflectiveness on what we've seen. But please now take us on your super exciting walk. All right. Well, I wanted to also just acknowledge that you and I have had quite some discussions about this leading up to just this little short description that we're going to do. And I want us to not only look at then and now, but I also want us to have discussions as to what we think these mean, what works, what doesn't work, etc. Because that's the point of this. It's not just historic. But it won't be like what in these days is so popular is a populist approach on things. So I appreciate it's going to be a very scholarly one, but it's going to be a scholarly one that takes a position as well. Okay. All right. And it started. Well, let's see. Why don't we go to our first slide? There we go. This is a picture of the international marketplace when it first opened, which was in 1956. And you'll notice that it is very open. It pretty much at that point consisted of buildings just along the perimeter of the sides of the lot. And it did not have a large overhead sign. It's only got a little small sign, which is kind of a handcrafted sign on the right hand side. And it's got these sort of exotica Tiki like adornments, which are in the center and prominently visible. Now, one of the reasons that the marketplace developed with the concept that it did, with the appearance that it did, was due to a specific person named Don the Beachcomber. So let's go to our next slide. And we will see what Don the Beachcomber did. This is a really good, I think, depiction of the Tiki fad, the exotica fad, which was not just confined to certainly the Hawaiian Islands or the United States because it was international. And I have to say that I sent Martin's YouTube clips of German depictions of Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian exotica, et cetera, from far away on the other side of the planet. You caught us. I did. I did. So I like to say that this whole exotica thing was something that was international. But if we can go back to the Don the Beachcomber slide, I want to talk about him a little bit. Don the Beachcomber was one of the two instigators of this whole exotica thing, this whole Tiki thing. He and his main competitor was a man named Trader Vic. They both got started on the West Coast in the 1930s. They both ended up doing a similar thing, which was restaurant and bar that had this exotic adornments. It was meant to be kind of a fantasy amalgamation of things from different cultures, mainly in the Pacific. It was supposed to be as though they were a trading post in which people were coming and going and bringing things from different lands. And they developed these exotic drinks. That was one of the main things that they also did was the tropical cocktails, which we saw in the previous picture. So Don the Beachcomber, having come here in 1947, built two structures in the site of what is now the marketplace. And one of them was a restaurant and bar. And the bar was called the Dagger Bar. And there was also a gift shop. And both of those structures were meant to look like big, thatched sort of Pacific fantasy ideas. And they had palm trees and other tropical plants all around them. And there actually were, in some cases, palm trees growing through where the structure was built. So here's Don the Beachcomber in this site in a really prominent place in Waikiki where lots of people are coming and going. He's built up a very successful business and he's also, at that point, helped popularize the concept internationally. Because at this point in the 50s we've got these exotic bars, et cetera, in different places in the world. So the next step up is let's make this even bigger. And so a shopping, the idea was let's create a shopping area on this site, which was all the Queen Emma Trust, which is relevant to the whole discussion as well in a way. And he informed and helped guide what the international marketplace became based on how he had created his earlier business. So let me just consult. Okay, so if we can go back to the third slide. And there's Don the Beachcomber again. So when the international marketplace was constructed, this was the Don the Beachcomber look. And as you can see, it's also the main other buildings at the time were built to mimic that too. And as you said, Pete Wemberley was the main architect of this. I want to emphasize too that the international marketplace was always not a real thing. It was like a little bit of Disneyland. It was a little recreated fantasy of Polynesia or an exotic land. So it's easy for people to look back and say nostalgically, oh, it was so real and it was so authentic. It never was. It was always a fun place that was a fantasy. Okay, now let's go to the next slide. And we will see a picture of the international marketplace as it appeared in the early 1960s. So the difference here is now it's got a big sign over the front to make it very clear to you. This is called the international marketplace. Come on in. You see the banyantry is very visible there. And it's got these two main sort of longhouse type buildings that are fronting onto Kalakawa Avenue that are the first thing that you see. And also, there are those exotic adornments or sort of decorative pieces there that are based on some Pacific cultural things, but they're not really real. Now, let's go to the next slide and see what does it look like today? There it is today. So what have we got? We now have a place where there are elements of the original structure in that there's a sign over the front. And so you can see where to walk in. There are some palm trees. But what we now have is a much bigger, more monolithic structure. And the main thing that's different is that tree is now not that visible. The tree is really encased in and surrounded by the structure. So what had been the focal point that you saw from the street is now still there, still in the same place. But it's not treated the same way at all. This is much more of a kind of business-like approach. In other words, this is a big building. You can come in, but it's a big building. Don't forget that. Okay, now let's see what we have next. Let's go next to the next slide. And here's the way the Banyan tree looks today. This is a photo that you took. And what we see is it's still there, but look at the building all around it. And this is going to be something that is going to have to be dealt with on the part of them, the maintenance of this tree. It's going to be very important because the tree is so closely surrounded by the building. This is, as we were talking earlier, an ever-growing organic thing. It's not a static sculpture that's just going to sit there. The tree is always going to have to be trimmed because the building is so close to it. Banyan trees also are these big wonderful things, but they drop a lot of stuff. There are leaves falling off all the time. There are berries falling off all the time. We're seeing this building right now nice and fresh. They're going to have to be keeping that up, very importantly. And that's one of the problems the old international marketplace had. It's not upkeeping. Although due to the concept of being more rugged, more natural, it probably wasn't so much obvious. That's exactly right because there was a lot more open space around it and it wasn't as sort of clean and swept and nice and neat. We'll see how that develops. Next picture, let's see our next photograph. There is the international marketplace tree house as it appeared in 1960. The tree house, now first of all, as you can see, the tree is considerably smaller. So building something in it was a lot easier to do. The tree house, there were actually different structures in there over a time period that kind of came and went. It could not have existed. Because that tree is ever-growing and ever-moving, the tree house could never have stayed there the entire time, but it has been gone for a long time. Now, the tree house was used for different things. When it was first built, you could have a... It was used as a little romantic getaway dinner spot for two. And you could order, you could say, okay, now I want my dinner there. You went in for several hours and you were left alone with your food. With your partner. With whoever you wanted to be in there with. And of course it was a very romantic place. Exotically romantic. Exotically romantic and here we are in the banyan tree and all by ourselves and we have a fine dinner with lots of alcohol, nice alcohol to keep us going through this wonderful experience. So after that it got turned into a radio station studio and it was used by a succession of different radio personalities and different radio stations. And of course, once you're on the air, you're able to say and we're broadcasting from the tree house in the international marketplace. So the place itself gets promotion. Plus it's this wonderful exotic. How many other radio stations in the USA are being broadcast from a tree? So it's a great deal for whatever radio station it was. Let's see how it looks today. Let's see how it looks today. Let's look at that. Okay, this is the tree house as it appears today. The tree house is no longer truly a tree house. It is a separate structure built among the branches or the structure of the tree. And it has no longer got any sort of function. It purely is a little diversion for people to walk into and then within it are some small historic displays. Now, I think it is really fun. I mean, and of course, again, this is a unique thing for everybody to want to walk into and look at. Does it have the same organic rationale as the previous one did? No, it does not. And again, because the tree is ever growing, it makes sense to, if you're trying to make this permanent, not actually attach it to the tree. All right. A very critical take on that would be, it's a tombstone of the old. And it is. It's a memorial. It's a memorial. It's just replicating or keeping the memory alive without having sort of an evolved function. Exactly. That is exactly right. That's exactly right. I didn't tell you upfront, but I tell you now, there's, we need to take a break, which we have to do now. We've got to go on and obviously speed up. So keep that thought and we'll be back in a minute. All right. All right. Aloha. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. I'm the host of Business in Hawaii. And we're a show about positive stories of business in Hawaii, both the companies and the individuals. We broadcast live every Thursday at 2 o'clock on thinktechhawaii.com. And we can also be found on Olelo during normal scheduling. Please join us so we can share with you some of the experience and insight to having a successful business or career here in Hawaii. Aloha. Hi. I'm Crystal. Welcome to thinktech, my show, Quok Talk. Normally airs at 10 o'clock on Tuesdays, but it's going to change to 11 o'clock. So don't miss it. It's an hour later. You can sleep in a little longer. Come with me and engage in some sensitive, provocative discussions on everything. It's all good. All right. We're going to talk about business issues, things that people don't dare talk about. We want it on the table. So join me. Welcome back to Humane Architecture here today with the Soto Brown and talking about on the Loulou's International Marketplaces. All right. Well, let's go to our next slide, slide number nine. And there are a few things in the marketplace today which I think are sort of referential to what used to be there before. Here's a picture of what was at the base of the tree originally in the late 1950s. We'll see that there's a big open space too. That's when that space existed. If we go to our next slide, we will see that today there still is, I think a little hint of that. There's a fountain and as you can see, people can walk around in it and play in it. Is that directly a reference to that previous one? I don't know. I sort of suspect that the architects and the planners did make reference to what had been there before. Next, we've got something that is still there today, but back in the old days, one of the big attractions was there were free Polynesian shows, meaning that you could come in without paying and watch a show. So this is a picture from the early 1960s of some of those performers on an outdoor stage. And if we go to our next picture, they're still doing that today because you've seen that, you took that picture and we know that they're carrying on the tradition and on one hand it's nice that they're doing it for free, on the other hand, the importance of it is to get people in there because they're customers. So it's not purely altruistic. Now as I consult, okay, let's talk about the shopping experience because that's very different. Our next picture, this is Diamond Head Sportswear as it appeared in right about probably the late 50s, not too long after this place opened. You will see that this is an un-air conditioned open space. Okay, we talked about, you know, energy saving and so forth. There was very little, there was probably no air conditioning at that time and nobody expected there to be air conditioning so nobody walked in and said, it's so hot, I don't want to buy anything. And it was part of the experience. It was part of the experience. Even the expectation of being tropical and being fantastic. Exactly, exactly. So if you look at this, you'll see they don't even have, they've got these bamboo sort of grids that they can lower to sort of cut, you know, close off the front. But that's all there is. Okay, well now, in our next slide, let's see what there's the shopping experience today. And there still are some mannequins there, as there were before, but this is Saks. This is the Saks Fifth Avenue store on the first floor. And just the fact that this store is called Saks Fifth Avenue takes us totally away from Diamond Head Sportswear. We're referencing New York, we're referencing Chic, we're referencing fashion, we're not referencing tropical anything. That's a total difference between those two international marketplaces. Next, let's look at a map of what, here's a little bit of a map of probably what things look like in the early 1960s. And you can see that there are a lot of disparate structures there and there are different architectural styles. But you also see there's a lot of open space. And one of the things that really made a huge difference in the international marketplace by the 1970s was all that open space got filled in. And as they pushed more and more buildings in because the value of the land increased, because the taxes increased, et cetera, you had a totally different situation. You had a very difficult way to get around. It was not the place it had been before. Next slide. The international marketplace today is multi-level. The way it was before was very much ground level. And as buildings got built and they got a little bit higher, it was difficult to get people up to the second floor. The way it is today, you've got much more of a big structure, as I said, different floors, different experiences, as to how that will translate into business is another thing which they will have to deal with. Let's see. Oh, I know. Our next picture. There we go. There are holes in this structure for trees to go through. That is sort of a playful touch, which I like. But it's also, interestingly, something that was developed in the 1950s. And these types of structural holes for palm trees to go through were common in Waikiki in the 50s and 60s. They also were part of Alamwana Center when it first opened in 1959. Which might be another show. We will talk about Alamwana and the Alamwana building later on. Close to the end of our slides, our next slide is going to show us, here's the top deck. There are three levels of this structure now. It's very much different in feeling. One thing I think is interesting there is, you'll notice that it's not all straight. The path that you follow within the structure is very meandering and it is not just this rectangular, I mean of course the confines of the lot are rectangular. But you as a pedestrian walk through on a curving path, is that in reference to something else I am not absolutely sure? I think it's appealing. I think it's nice. But why they did it that way I'm not sure. I don't want to take a guess on that. Our second to last slide shows us something that I think is an improvement. And that is that the entire lot, the entire space, is occupied by this one structure now. So we have an entranceway on Kalakawa Avenue which I showed earlier. And now there's this one which is on Kuhio Avenue. So there is a coherence to the whole thing which I think improves it. There are similar facades on either end and you as a person who walks in have a much better sense of where you're going to, I think that helps their entire identity. Finally our last slide. This is really good. This is really good. This is from the film Blue Hawaii from 1961. Pardon me, which of course is an Elvis film. And in this film Elvis's girlfriend Miley Duvall works supposedly at a travel agency. And there is Miley herself played by Joan Blackman sitting at her desk at her travel agency job. And in the background is the actual international marketplace. They set up a camera on Kalakawa Avenue. They shot this backdrop. They built a set in Hollywood and they pretended that you were on Kalakawa Avenue looking across the street to the international marketplace. So millions of people saw that when they saw Blue Hawaii. Alright, that's kind of our just then and now history. Let's talk about some other stuff. And also since you nicely give different credits to the pictures I took that last one from my very own German copy of Blue Hawaii and you just shared with me the many different movie posters of that movie. That's right. And the image, so it's called Blaue Sauvage, the original sort of German version of it. And I think we have couple minutes left here, seven minutes left. And I think it's already clear we won't come to a conclusion maybe there is no such thing. Correct. But I think if this is good for something, it's a question of where are we as a society? Maybe what does evolution have to do with society? Are we evolving? Are we getting more civilized? Or are we getting more de-civilized? And that obviously depends on the point of view and the position. Absolutely. And that's why it is, I think, critical food for thought here. I'm just going to throw something in that relates to my sort of hint at the very beginning. If we talk about authenticity, that itself is a tricky kind of beast. You already said it was maybe perceived as something that had to do with indigenous, which it wasn't. So it was already very nostalgic to begin with. And now people being nostalgic about it just continues that kind of story. But if we reference to this one picture with the Polynesian shoal, for example, you said you were still around buildings that first of all try to reference the indigenous way of building. And they in fact utilized the way they were working as natural ventilation, as shading, as actually local materials, more or less, or more than less. Today, and there's also an interesting civil beat article from recently where we also sort of looked at and there's one point in there where the author basically I think quotes a visitor and they talk about the astroturf. They're saying there's actually astroturf in there and they're thinking the mum says maybe this is a good thing then because my kid doesn't get all dirty. I think that itself from a sociological point of view, I think the original one was a gritty, was a dirty. Absolutely. And in many levels also in levels of inclusiveness because little people with little businesses could do business and little people with little money could buy little things that some were probably even made here, others weren't and when globalization increased obviously decreasingly. But also people could buy something very, very cheap and all these things are basically not apparent anymore, right? Is that fair to say? No, that's absolutely right. And we discussed earlier before we go around the show about just the changes that have occurred because of technology, because of travel, because of politics. The retailing scene in Honolulu and in Waikiki has altered dramatically from what it was in 1956. In 1956, the primary people coming here were American tourists. They didn't want a Saks Fifth Avenue because they had that at home. What they wanted were exotic things that they couldn't get at home. We are now in a situation where a good chunk of our tourists are Asian. They are buying, because that's the trend that they have, high end designer goods. That's what they want to buy when they come here. So Alamoana Center and the International Marketplace and Waikiki in general have changed to accommodate that because they now have the funds to do it. They politically are able to travel and that's what they're looking for. So that's what the customers want and that's what they're getting. So we're going to say it evolved along the lines of capitalism because we actually run by, everything post-occupancy has increasingly been commercialized. But when we look at things like Astroturf, we look at the indigenous, not because they had a great discussion we had before, it was like they didn't really have the strategy of being sustainable how we call this today. They just had to be because that's all the chance they had because they were isolated, all the stuff that was around, so they worked with all that. But actually there is a brochure, the big guide brochure with all the shops is called the story to be continued. That's the official branding of the enterprise. So I'm allowing myself to make this critical pitch and seeing their Astroturf, if we think about Astroturf, Astroturf is actually petroleum-based material. It uses crude oil that we know isn't helping the environment. Also the shops are air conditioned. So the question is, would the indigenous people have done that? Maybe not. So then maybe rather than saying that and tracing it back, it would be honest to say we have evolved, we have evolved, but that's maybe not so appealing. That's not so selling. That's true. Again, when you talk about, one of the things I like to say is the expectations are there. We do not, we expect air conditioning. People expect air conditioning. If you don't have it and you walk in and it's uncomfortably warm, you might walk out. In 1956, they didn't have that expectation. They just accepted what was going on and said, this is okay, plus it looks kind of interesting. So our exotic slash exotic, our attitude is gone. And so are the spaces that cater to that. Absolutely. As exciting as this is, unfortunately we knew this coming. We ran out of time. 30 minutes is horrible for both of us. It didn't work. It didn't work, but it worked out. We could have talked a lot longer. But what it does is have you come back. That's fine. That's fine. We already sort of agreed. We already have a couple of projects. So I look so much forward to that. Thank you so much. You're welcome. This is awesome. I want people to start thinking about cultures and where they are in their position. I hope so. So thank you so much. Thank you. And I also just want to put in a plug. Every Thursday on Facebook, I do something called Throwback Thursday from Bishop Museum. And if you liked this kind of little historical presentation, I do them every week on different subjects, sort of in a similar way. So you can watch me there too. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Please do that. And you guys also please be back on Tuesday, early evenings for Humane Architecture. Next time, a very special guest who I know you know as well. This is whom I call a most investigative reporter of our current days. And that's Kurt Sandberg. Oh, yeah. Who's back on the island. And he's on the show. Excellent. Excellent. He'll have lots to say. That's for sure. So see you then. Bye-bye.