Description of site.
Discussion
of community and its culture as seen through site.
Analysis
of intercultural and communicative dimensions.
Articulate
theoretical concepts.
Material
and interviews from culture or experts on site.
Fort Street Mall cuts through the heart
of downtown Honolulu, spans the historical arc of Hawaii, displays the
diversity of the world’s cultural spectrum in its various shops and cafes, and
captures the eclectic cross-section of people who trace their origins from
Oceania, Asia, Europe, and Africa. The casual sightseers who visit Fort Street
Mall readily gain access and insight into the community and culture of
authentic Honolulu and Hawaii, yet at the same time experiences the uniqueness
of Fort Street Mall. For the observant visitor, the full
dimension of the cultural history, stories, identity, values, and meaning are
revealed through the people who inhabit, the buildings that line, and the shops
and cafes that make up the Fort Street Mall.
Fort Street Mall, which takes its name
from one of the oldest streets in Honolulu, honors the Honolulu Fort that once
stood at the intersection of Queen and Fort Streets. The old fort originally
was a Russian-American Company defensive blockhouse that was built to protect
trade through the Honolulu Harbor. King Kamehameha, concerned that the close
proximity of the Russians endangered his palace, ordered a contingent of his
Hawaiian soldiers to persuade the Russians to leave. Threatened by the large
number of Hawaiians, the Russians hastily abandoned their blockhouse and
retreated to Kauai. After the capture of the blockhouse from the Russians, King
Kamehameha used the old fort to protect Honolulu Harbor and perform a number of
administrative functions, including many years service as a prison. The old
fort was demolished 1857, and Walker Park, created in 1951, now occupies the
site and serves with its paved walkway, benches, sculpture, and historic
wrought-iron centerpiece sign as the gateway to Fort Street Mall.
Fort Street Mall extends from Walker
Park, located across Nimitz Highway from Aloha Tower on Honolulu Harbor’s
waterfront, seven blocks northeast toward the Ko’olau Mountains to end at
the twin flagstaffs on
Beretania Street, where fireman from the historic Central
Fire Station each morning start the new day by hoisting the American and
Hawaiian flags.
Fort Street Mall is divided by Hotel Street into a lower and upper mall, each
with its own distinct character. Four historic streets cross the lower mall:
Queen
Street, the narrow Merchant Street, bustling multi-lane King Street, and Hotel
Street, which now is exclusively dedicated to the transit of city buses. The
upper mall extends for three-city block with no crossing vehicular traffic
since the narrow Pau’ahi Street and Chaplain Lane dead-end into the upper mall
and permits no cars.
The history of Hawaii is contained in
the historic and modern buildings that line Fort Street Mall: The Cathedral of
Our Lady of Peace (1843), Judd Building (1898), Sacred Hearts Convent School
(1901), Pantheon Block (1911), McCorriston Building (1914), C. Brewer & Co.
Building (1930), Central Fire Station (1935), Topa Financial Center (1968), and
the newer, sleeker financial and banking office buildings towering over the
lower mall. But the history also needs to be considered in the context of the
geographic positions these buildings occupy on the mall and the function they
serve.
The character of Fort Street Mall
changes as one journeys from Walker Park to the Central Fire Station. Lower
Fort Street Mall is an attractive pedestrian walkway that connects to the Aloha
Tower on the Honolulu waterfront. Visitors arriving in Honolulu can walk to
this pedestrian mall from the cruise ship terminal. This tree-lined mall is a
popular place for office worker to meet and enjoy the shade and ocean breezes.
Serenity and quiet solitude dominate the plaza-like mall south of Hotel Street.
This part of Fort Street Mall is surrounded by financial buildings: the Bank of
Hawaii headquarters (second largest Hawaii bank), an American Savings Bank
tower, and the Pioneer Plaza hosts other office buildings. Tenants of these
office buildings frequent this part of the Mall. 
The Topa Financial Center--originally
called the AmFac Center--(745 Fort Street) and The C. Brewer & Co. Building
(827 Fort Street) are reminders of the history of
Hawaii’s Big Five, a close-knit oligarchy of companies that for well over a
century once controlled much of Hawaii’s economy and society. All five
companies grew out of merchant houses established during the early days when
Honolulu served as port of call for whalers and as a hub for the early seal
pelt and sandal wood trade. The Big Five fortunes grew during the expansion of
sugar production that followed the 1876 enactment of the Reciprocity Treaty,
which provided favored trading status for Hawaii-based sugar growers. The Big
Five contributed as key players to the transformation of Hawaii from an
independent kingdom through territorial era to the present day where many still
play a role as some of the world’s prominent agro-businesses, Hawaii’s largest
corporate landholders, and mainstays of Honolulu’s business establishment.
Although the Big Five stabilized the status quo in Hawaii throughout the 20th
century and contributed to the state’s economic growth, today, following the
closure of sugar plantations and divestment of land-holdings, the influence and
visibility of the Big Five is considerable lessened.
Once across Hotel Street, the
businesses and people on the Mall show a dynamic identity change due to the
prominent dual presence of the International Food Court (area between Hotel
Street and Chaplain Lane) and Downtown Campus of Hawaii Pacific University
(HPU). The International Food Court--fronting the former Blaisdell Hotel with
its "birdcage" elevator--hosts an early morning and lunchtime crowd
and is comprised of a mix of distinctive, eclectic hole-in-the-wall cafes.
Patrons eat and lounge around the outdoor, umbrella-covered tables while
student pedestrian stream by to and from classes. The diversity of food choices
is fantastic.
The Avenue du Crepe Café, occupies the
north corner next to a sign-post bearing the signs Do-not-enter and One-way,
which perfectly captures the hauteur of the owner. Jo Jo Coffee and Espresso is
home to fat spam musubis and the breakfast bentos with glorious yellow
scrambled eggs; the Ohana Bento and Sushi offers hand-roll and California-roll
among other choices; the Fort Street Café has spicy Thai chicken and Vietnamese
pho; the La Taqueria Ricardo offers the best downtown breakfast burrito, made
with chorizo, egg, refried beans and guacamole and served by a Korean woman;
and next door is a no-name steak, chicken, and fish hole-in-the wall food
service noted only for its stylish menu glued to the wall. On the south corner
of the building is the Dreamer Home-style Café. Outside, propped against the
café’s graffiti-tagged doorway, stands the multi-page menu that features an
amazing list of breakfast and lunch choices of every imaginable combination,
which makes us wonder what the proprietor’s home life must be like.
Nevertheless, the International Food
Court exudes the charm of any European pedestrian mall; a charm that is only
furthered by the exotic bodega and cafes that could have been transported
intact from the back alleys of Seoul, Manila, or New York City. And the people,
we challenge you to find a racial or ethnic type that is not represented.
Also on the upper mall are the
Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace and Sacred Hearts Convent School (1183 &
1159
Fort Street) embody the presence of the Roman Catholic Church in Hawaii. The
first Catholic missionaries arrived in Honolulu in 1827. King Kamehameha III
provided a parcel of land for the construction of a chapel, and the cathedral
was subsequently built on the site where it remains the center of Roman
Catholic worship in Hawaii. The Sacred Hearts Convent School during the late
19th and early 20th century served as a primary education school for many of
Hawaii’s children and brought many students into downtown Honolulu. The convent
school population increase led to the construction of a new school building in
1901, but continued growth forced the convent school in 1909 to move away from
Fort Street to a new Sacred Hearts Academy in Kaimuki. The Sacred Hearts Convent School building now
serves as a small chapel and museum honoring the historic saintly work by Roman
Catholic priest and nuns in the leprosy colony on the Kalaupapa Peninsula of
Molokai. And adjacent church buildings now provide charity services to the new
“lepers” of American society--the homeless, the underprivileged, and the
downtrodden that inhabit Fort Street Mall by day.
The Pantheon Block building (1102-1122
Fort Street) started
as the Pantheon Stables. However, the stables were a victim of the nearby Chinatown
Fire of 1900 when the stables were burned in an effort to contain the fire. The
more impressive brick and concrete structure Pantheon Block building was
subsequently built on the corner. Many
independent small stores and cafes now occupy this building, including the
fresh and healthy Ahi and Vegetable café; a tiny, crowded no-name bodega that
spills out onto the street; the King Fort Magazine Shop; the Local Fever
Clothing that’s always hosting a 50%-off red-tag sale; and the Nayong Filipino
and Local dine-in, sit-down café. The franchise Subway sandwich shop that
anchors the upper corner of the building is exotic and alien in compared to its
neighbors.
Throughout the 1800s, historic Fort
Street grew as the center of commerce for Honolulu. By the 1950’s, Fort Street
was the focal point for shopping and hosted most of the major large department
stores in Hawaii. However, the 1959 opening of the Ala Moana Shopping Center,
which was closer to the emerging Waikiki tourist hotels, started the gradual
decline of the street’s fortunes with the slow migration of Fort Street’s
retail businesses to the new shopping center. Until the construction of the Ala
Moana Shopping Center, Fort Street was the shopping center of Honolulu.
Unfortunately, the decline of Fort Street Mall as fashion or clothing
destination is nearly complete with the recent closure of Macy's.
The reversing of the decline of Fort
Street started in 1965 when Hawaii Pacific University was granted a charter as
an independent, nonsectarian liberal arts college, established its main campus
on upper Fort Street, and became the anchoring tenant. And in 1968, Honolulu
converted Fort Street into a pedestrian mall. Since then, the institution has
grown on Fort Street Mall to become a culturally, racially, and ethnically
diverse campus with a student population that geographically represents all 50
states and more than 100 countries. In addition, the students and faculty
engage in a variety of intercultural relationships that span difference in age,
physical ability, gender, ethnicity, class, religion, race and nationality. HPU
encourages many diverse professional, friendly, and romantic relationships, and
this creates an understanding of how the mixing all cultures is beneficial our
personal lives. Through these intercultural relationships, we learn about the
world, break our stereotypes, and acquire new interpersonal cultural skills.
Although HPU students bring differing
languages, histories, and economic backgrounds to HPU, the end result of the
mix does not resemble the melting-pot analogy where: “…immigrants enter and
blend into the American society.” This clearly is not a realistic analogy for
the HPU student population. The HPU student population is better represented by
the tossed-salad analogy, an analogy that parallels the history, the character,
and the mix of people and small shops and hole-in-the-wall cafes that make-up
the mall. Although many diverse cultures come together and mix, despite mixing
all retain their own unique cultural identities. Thus, differencing student
cultures can be seen streaming and mixing together throughout Fort Street Mall,
but in the end the students still hold onto their original backgrounds,
languages, norms, values, and beliefs. To honor these differences, HPU
celebrates the multiple cultural diversities through intercultural days and
other on-campus activities that accentuate the tossed-salad character that
makes HPU a truly unique school.
Still, the variety of languages spoken
of Fort Street Mall and in Hawaii can be an issue. With so many cultures and
differing languages coming together, this can lead to difficulty and
frustration in shopping, ordering food, making friends and coordinating course
work. Expressions used in Hawaii and mainland United States often have
different meanings; this difference is even more pronounced between people of
differing countries when languages and cultures are interpreted differently.
For example the expression, “how are you today?” Some people may think you
actually want to know how they are doing, whereas most often it is simply being
used as a greeting. But the struggle joined to conquer the language differences
is a struggle ultimately won.
On Fort Street Mall, the varied
cross-section of people includes not only the HPU students of the upper Mall,
the office-workers of the lower Mall, and the transiting cruise-ship tourist.
During the day, the drab homeless men and women who inhabited the mall bring
their own distinctive temperaments and sorrow to the mix. Some mornings, a
distinguished elderly local man sits on the flower shop ledge near the
flag-poles, and he greets all who pass by in a deep booming voice; the message
he proclaims over and over again to no one in particular is: “my love for love
is deep and everlasting.” Each morning a trio of scruffy, beaten-down men, one
in a wheelchair due to an amputated leg, trek down the mall to McDonalds for
coffee. They pass at the newspaper stand next to me so the wheelchair-bound man
can read the headlines, before they continue their journey. Although all wear
faded, mismatched military uniforms, none was wounded on the battlefield; all
are casualties of the daily battle of survival on the street. 
Down the mall near Ross’s, a disheveled
man writhes on the ground, two women squat and transfer their belongings from a
rain-soaked cardboard boxes to cast-off plastic bags, while another man jiggle
the garbage in a trashcan in his search for redeemable cans. Across the Hotel
Street at the bus stop, a street trumpeter plays a mournful tune that we slowly
realize is Eleanor Rigby. The lyrics come to mind--“all the lonely people,
where do they all come from?”--and captures the mood. We finish our breakfast
bentos, drink the remainder of our coffees, and hand the empty cups to the man
at the trashcan so he can get the free refills. The presence of these lonely
people is a constant reminder that dogs live better in America than many of our
fellow human beings. 
In the 1970s, Honolulu completed the
conversion of Fort Street into a pedestrian mall. Fort Street Mall, a street
once better known for its vagrants and pigeons than for its growing urban
charm, remains Honolulu’s sole walking street. And as the mall continued to
improve over the last few decades, it offers an exceptional strolling and
browsing experience for pedestrians. Food, the people, and the building that
surround Fort Street Mall all represent the historical and cultural diversity
that can be seen not only at HPU, but in Hawaii as well. It is ‘tossed’
together: North, Central and South American, Asian, European, African, Oceanic
and Hawaiian influences can all be found on Fort Street Mall.
For the observant visitor, the
community and culture of the real Honolulu and Hawaii are readily displayed to
sightseers who visit Fort Street Mall. Fort Street Mall is the beating heart of
downtown Honolulu. The historical arc of Hawaii is contained in its surrounding
building; and the contemporary history is being written every day by the people
who inhabit, work and study around, and prowl its length. The Mall holds up for
examination and engagement the broad cultural spectrum of all the diversity the
world has to offer, and this is embodied in its eclectic mix of shops and
cafes. And the diverse cross-section of people who inhabit buildings that
enclose Fort Street Mall, only serves to completes and reveal the full
dimension of the cultural history, stories, identities, values, and meanings.
