 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Dokomomo Hawaii Show. I am the host of this particular program here in Think Tech Hawaii. I am DeSoto Brown. I am the Bishop Museum Historian here at home. And we're continuing now with the second of three programs that I'm putting on right now about the history of transportation on the island of Oahu and I'm doing this because our train system, our new rail system will be starting up its first segment in just a few days from now. Or weeks, let's say. So for that auspicious occasion, let us look back and look forward as to what's been going on with transportation on Oahu. So let's go to the first slide. Well, last week or the last time I ended the previous program, we talked about the beginning of automobiles here in Hawaii and we started with this pic. We're starting with this picture today, which I ended with the last program. This is a very early photograph of a very early automobile on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki. This picture is probably taken about 1905. This is an oldsmobile, the first very popular car before the Model T, which lots of people know about. This is the first car that really began to sell in any particular quantities in the United States. And as you can see, it's a really little contraption. It only holds two people. It doesn't have a steering wheel. It only can be steered with a tiller bar. But even as insignificant as this looks, this was people recognized even then what a revolution cars were and how much of a difference they were gonna make. Next picture. This cartoon from a newspaper in 1901 is a very clear indication of what I just said. It is the old year of 1901 being superseded by the new year of 1902. And the old man of 1901 is riding along in a very broken down cart that's being pulled by a mule who's looking very slow. And of course the old year is very aged and decrepit just like the cart is. And on the right is the new year of 1902, the 1902 baby representing the new year, driving by in a new fangled automobile that shows you how people recognized what a big deal this was. Next picture. So when cars first came on the market and the first cars I will point out also were brought to the Hawaiian Islands in 1899, well, those early years of cars only wealthy people could afford them. And so in this picture on the left, you can see this is a chauffeur driven automobile in Kopiolani Park with diamond head in the background, a very well-dressed lady in the back seat and a chauffeur driving her in the front seat. This is an early car probably 1910, 1910 to 1915. But things began to change certainly by the 1920s when more and more people could afford cars. And one of the reasons was as wealthier people bought new cars, they then had old used cars to trade in or sell. So that enabled more and more people to be able to purchase cars. And so by the time of the two pictures on the right, the top one from the 1930s and the bottom one from 1947, lots of regular people, even people who didn't have a lot of money were able to afford and drive automobiles. Next picture. The reason, as I said, all of this, the automobile ownership trickled down, as we might say economically, to people with a lot less money was because of the used cars and used car market and the used car selling procedures became very familiar certainly by the 1930s. These two pictures, one is from the 1950s on the top and the one on the bottom, the large color pictures from 1965, used car lots became a very common sight in Honolulu. And they all looked very similar. At night, they were illuminated by strings of white light bulbs. And during the day, they had these small triangular flags on ropes or strings above them. And used cars, of course, sold for a lot less than a new car. And so almost everybody was able to afford a car who wanted one, meaning there were lots and lots more cars on the roads. Next picture. Even if you could not afford to purchase a car, you could still ride in a car. As I mentioned in the program I did last time, there were horse-drawn vehicles that you could either rent or be driven around in and they were called hacks. Well, that transformed into taxis. And there were certainly taxis by very early on in the entire automobile process. This is a picture of the Black and White Taxi Company, which was on Dillingham Boulevard. This picture is from 1955 and she is standing next to a new 1955 Chevrolet. Well, today we still do have taxis, but of course we've also got the ride-sharing programs which many people use as well. And again, it's not always if you can't afford a car, it's sometimes you don't wanna drive. But even so, cars are available for pretty much everybody now. Next picture. With the growth of automobiles came a whole bunch of things that had to be created for the infrastructure. First of all, automobiles need fuel. They need flammable gasoline in order to run because most cars of course run on gasoline. There are electric cars, there were very early electric cars as well, but most of us drive cars that run on gas. That means that either fuel has to be brought here because we don't have any petroleum here or crude oil is brought here and then it's refined. So that meant that we had to have at least one refinery. And here are pictures of one of those refineries at Campbell Industrial Park. And you can see that not only is this a huge polluting type of procedure, but we also have to have a lot of storage tanks for fuel to be stored. Next picture. These two photographs were taken 40 years apart and they show the standard oil facility in Honolulu. The top picture from 1913 is really ironic because the vehicles that have big tanks on them are carts that are horse drawn carts. There's only one automobile in the photograph, it's on the left. So ironically, while not all of the fuel in this picture might be gasoline for cars, it means that fuel for cars is still being delivered by horses, which is really ironic. In the picture on the bottom, that's from 1943, 40 years later, 1953, 40 years later, excuse me. Now it's a much bigger standard oil facility in Honolulu and furthermore, gasoline is now being delivered by truck, which is run by an internal combustion engine using gasoline. So now the delivery systems have caught up with the automobiles themselves. Next picture. So something that we don't even really think about, but which are an inevitable part of our lives are gas stations. All of those gas stations that we're familiar with and all the ones that used to exist, they all had to be built from scratch. So in order to support automobiles as the main mode of transportation, hundreds of gas stations have had to be built, many of them of course are no longer with us, but we still have them today. The picture on the left, the black and white picture, is a union oil station that was run by Duke Kohanimoku. Yes, the famous Duke Kohanimoku, famous swimmer and surfer. He ran two gas stations for a time in 1934, here in Honolulu. This one was on the corner of Palakawa Avenue and Seaside Avenue and Waikiki. The picture on the right is a more modern station. This is from the 1960s and gas stations still look somewhat similar to these today, although there is a very important difference, which I'll get to in just a minute, but let's go on to the next picture. And an important part of gasoline, of course, as I said, is it's flammable. That's how an internal combustion engine works. Gasoline is ignited so that it literally explodes inside the cylinder of the engine. Well, that means that gasoline and oil, which burns too, are in fact not only dangerous because they can ignite and cause huge fires like the large picture that you see, which was a fire in a storage facility next to Honolulu Harbor in 1980, in which, as I remember, either a firefighter was killed or badly injured and burned during this catastrophe. But it also means that car engines, which run very hot, can catch on fire too because they've got a lot of gasoline in them. There's gas tanks. So if a vehicle catches on fire in, as you can see in the picture on the right, sometimes it can be burned. And that means there's danger involved for anybody in a burning vehicle. Next photo. Cars have to be sold to the public in some manner. And that means that dealerships have to be created as well. Places that not only sold cars, but also serviced cars. So here's the picture of an early automobile showroom. This is a company selling Buick cars and it was located on Baratania Street in Honolulu. And car dealerships have come and gone. And some of them have been very big. Aloha Motors, which was located in, right on the edge of Waikiki on the site of where the convention center is now in Honolulu. That for a time was the biggest Chevrolet dealer in the entire United States right here in Honolulu. So car dealerships are an important part of our economy as well. Next photo. One thing I said that has changed about gas stations, they used to be service stations. That was the term that we use because they also serviced and repaired cars. Older cars needed a lot more servicing. Their engines needed a lot more work on a regular basis. They broke down more and they needed a lot more replacement parts. So gas stations in many cases are places where people used to take their cars to be serviced, fixed, et cetera. You could also buy parts at gas stations in addition to getting gasoline. This function is pretty much gone for good now. Gas stations just sell gasoline almost every one of them. And they also have taken up the space that used to be occupied by servicing automobiles by putting in convenience stores. That means that there are a handful of independent stations or independent businesses that service cars, but basically you now have to take your car back to the dealer. This is an important shift in how cars are serviced and it's happened within the last few decades. Next picture. There have been many other changes brought on by the abundance of cars that we have here on Oahu and in the Hawaiian Islands and in fact all over the world. Now one of them was the growth of suburbs because suburbs were created specifically to accommodate people who had cars. And in the large picture you can see an aerial view of a 1960s subdivision here on Oahu laid out in a typical pattern, lots and lots of independently standing single family homes. And this also meant that the homes had to accommodate cars. So in the other two photographs you see first a drawing and then a photograph, one from the 60s, one from the 50s of cars accommodated in homes. It became necessary for new homes to have a two car garage. And that was considered ample for many years. Today a two car garage really isn't adequate because lots more people tend to live in single family homes, all of whom own cars. So there are lots more cars parked on the streets as well as in not only the garages but the driveways of many of these single family homes. And this is a huge change in the sprawl, the urban sprawl created by the city of Honolulu. Next picture. The biggest change I think in how suburbs were developed on Oahu and in Honolulu was because of cars being able to go up steep hills. So after the invention of and the popularity of automobiles, suburbs began to grow and fill in tremendously on the slopes behind the city of Honolulu on the Koalao mountain range. And that's because even though there were some development, some suburban developments that predated cars are were started right at the time of automobiles. And those were Pacific Heights and Wilhelmina Rise. It took a long time for people to start buying and building homes there buying landed building homes because getting up a steep street up a steep hill was not easy in a horse drawn vehicle. But in a car, it didn't make any difference. So that's why so many of our ridges are so developed today because of automobiles. Next picture. There were some other unexpected things that automobiles brought to us. In the picture on the left, you can see the drive-in movie theater. Drive-in movie theaters, there were six of them in all in Hawaii in a period between 1949 and the late 1980s. This is the opening of the Weilai Drive-in Theater in the middle 1950s in the larger picture. This is something that really thrived in the 50s and the 60s and in nowadays is completely gone. We no longer think about going to a movie in a car. At the top right is the introduction of the first car available bank teller machine. I mean, this wasn't literally a machine, a human being did operate it, but it meant that you could drive up to an automatic teller or a teller of some sort and not even get out of your car in order to do a bank transaction. These were very popular in the 1950s. This is the first one which started in 1953 in downtown Honolulu. A number of branch banks were built with automobile accessible teller windows. They're all gone now. We no longer expect to do that, but we still do go to restaurants which serve us in cars. The drive-in restaurant began here in the 1920s, but it really thrived and exploded in the 50s and 60s and there's a picture of Frankie's drive-in and the lower right. Today, we expect to be able to be served in our car by driving up to the drive-through window at least to receive our food. In the 50s, you either had to get out of your car and go to the building to get your food or some of the larger drive-ins had car hops that came out to you. And the car hops have become this sort of nostalgic symbol of the 1950s even though they weren't as commonplace as most people sort of think they were. Next picture, to accommodate automobiles and to give them places to drive, we have built these immense structures on Oahu. On the left is a picture of the Likidike Highway on the windward side as it comes out of the Wilson tunnels at the base of the Kualaau Mountains. At the top, the airport viaduct of the H1 freeway which is an immense concrete structure. And most of us don't even think about it because we are so accustomed to it. It's been there for such a long time since the 1980s. It is a huge and very unsightly thing. And at the bottom is the H3 freeway, again at the base of the Kualaau Mountains which took decades to build. There was a tremendous amount of controversy involved in it. It cost a huge amount of money to build. But again, these are things that we will do to accommodate automobiles. And in truth, our economy requires that we have these huge structures to accommodate automobiles. Next picture. What we find very frequently, unfortunately, is that the roads that we have built for cars gradually fill up so much that we have to either build other roads or we have to widen the roads we have. So here's a picture of the H1 freeway being widened for the, I believe, Pearl City and IEA exit. And look at that. You can see that there already are five lanes there and that wasn't enough. We had to build two or three more lanes in this huge project. And when we have to do that, of course, we can, we cause problems and tie-ups for traffic that's on the existing roads. But pretty much we will do whatever is necessary to accommodate automobiles. Next picture. Cars are problematic in that they are big machines and whether they are driving or whether they are parked and cars are parked almost 90% probably of the time that they are in existence, they still take up room. So when they're parked, they require space. And here are pictures of parking lots over the years. The picture on the left, the kind of informal parking lot for the Honolulu Stadium when it was located in Honolulu in Mo'ili-Ili. This is a picture from right after when the, from 1927, soon after the stadium opened, the top right is a picture of a parking lot on Kapilani Boulevard in the 1940s, 1946. And then a picture at the bottom from 1959 of a star supermarket parking lot in Mo'ili-Ili. Again, all of this space is required, all of the pavement for us to put our cars because they take up so much room. Next picture. Cars are all independently operated by a driver and that means that with all of these cars in use, but all of these different people controlling them, they can have crashes, they can run into things, they can run into people, they can run into objects, they can run into each other. And so this has been happening since the very beginning when cars first were brought to the Hawaiian Islands. And as you can see in these photographs, cars can be badly damaged or destroyed by running into things. This is a major source of economic impact because not only do people have to pay for fixing cars or buying new cars, they also have to pay for insurance to prevent, to pay for damage like this when it occurs. Next picture. The really terrible aspect of all of these car crashes and collisions, of course, is that people are injured and killed. So these pictures from the 1950s and into the 1980s and 90s show you the results of car crashes. People are injured and people are killed. And the first car crash fatality occurred on Oahu in 1906. Since that time, it's my estimate that over 5,000 people have been killed by automobiles in the Hawaiian Islands. That's probably low. There's probably been more than that. And countless numbers more have been injured and traumatized mentally as well. This is something we live with without even thinking about it. We don't even give any thought to the deaths and injuries because it's just part of our daily existence. If you, however, have been through one of these incidents, personally, it's affected you. And it may even not be because you were injured but because, again, as I said, you were traumatized. Next picture, cars have to be shipped here. This means that not only once they're here, they're using energy. They are using energy to be put on ships and brought here. And you can see in the picture on the right, one car being unloaded from a ship in 1922 in Honolulu Harbor. And in the picture on the bottom from the 1980s, this is what we have now, immense ships bringing hundreds of cars each time they get here. Cars no longer have to be unloaded individually anymore. They drive on and they drive off. But still, this is a huge aspect of what's going on as part of our existence. And we, again, have to accommodate all these new cars. Next picture, when cars go out of use, they don't magically disappear. Cars last usually about 10 years. They begin to wear out and get junked nine or 10 years old and then thereafter more and more of them go away. Well, once they're no longer in use, they, as I said, they don't magically disappear. They have to be put somewhere. They have to be dumped somewhere. They get abandoned in places where we have to cope with them. And in the picture on the right, you can see cars piled up, junked cars next to Kawainui Swamp and next to Kailua on the island of Oahu. That means that they are polluting and damaging this natural wetland. Well, this no longer occurs, but for many years, the swamp was considered this unnecessary, unusable piece of property. So you could dump cars there. Well, fortunately, we no longer think about that, but it still is something that we have to cope with. Next photograph. It would be wonderful if cars magically composted themselves, recycled themselves, just went into the ground and were reduced to all of their original components. That's not what happens, even though it looks like what's happening in this picture, which was taken in the 1990s by me outside of Hilo, Hawaii, not on Oahu. But while parts of cars do in fact go away, and I mean the steel of the car body will rust and will be reduced eventually to nothing, there are all these other parts of the cars that either don't rust or they're not going to. There's glass, there's plastic, there are other types of metals. All of these things are pollutants, all of these things are things that we have to deal with in the environment as we discard the cars which are no longer running. This is a major thing to consider, and this is something everybody probably has some awareness of, but it's something that even though cars are very important to our entire economy, we can't function without cars with mostly internal combustion engines, although again, we've got a lot of electric cars now. But all of these things that I've just mentioned mean that while cars are incredibly useful and they are incredibly convenient, they also have a lot of detrimental factors, particularly for those of us living on an island where it's not easy to dump things out of sight that are out of sight, out of mind. So let's go to the last picture. And this is the end of this particular segment of my three-part series. This is, that's the history of automobiles. Now we're gonna look ahead in the next program I'll be doing towards our future. And the future of Oahu is this new rail system. Now, as I said, at the time that I'm doing this program, the rail system will be opening in a matter of days for the first time. It's gonna be the first segment that opens. There's been a lot of controversy about this rail system. There have been a lot of criticisms of the rail system. And I'm gonna be addressing what are the advantages and disadvantages of the rail and what is it going to be doing for us and to us in the future? We've looked at the past. We've looked at what street cars did. We've looked at what the rail systems that existed before had did for the island of Oahu. We've certainly just looked at what automobiles have done. Now we're gonna look at the rail system when I continue this program, which I'll be doing a week from today. If you're watching this in the future, of course, the weeks don't make any difference. You can watch the three programs all together. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is DeSoto Brown. I have been doing this program for Doko Momo Hawaii, which is a fan club, if you will, for mid-century architecture. And the time period I just was talking about is the time period that Doko Momo looks at the architecture of. I hope to see you for my last of the three programs next time I'm on. And until then, thanks for joining me and Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.