A statue of King David Kalakaua by the sculptor Henry Blancini has been erected in the park—a bronze statue of the King seated. Bronze as a medium is well adapted to showing a youthful glow on the King’s features, a brightness and innocence in his eyes. A taro plant grows on one side of the monarch, and on his knee he holds an ‘ipu heke, the hourglass-shaped Hawaiian double-gourd drum used to beat out the rhythm for hula.

A merrie monarch is not necessarily an honest monarch. As Sarah Vowell puts it in her book about Hawaii, Unfamiliar Fishes, “Kalakaua’s weaknesses and strengths were of a piece.” He accepted large bribes from the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, who because of his influence over Kalakaua, became known as “the uncrowned king of Hawaii.” According to a biography of Spreckels, the King’s cashbook shows that he received promissory notes from Spreckels for $40,000 at the same time that Spreckels was granted a lease on water rights on Maui that would make it possible for the German immigrant to dominate sugar production on that island. The transfer of the $40,000 coincided with a card game between Spreckels and the King. Robert Louis Stevenson records being present when in a single afternoon the king downed three bottles of champagne and two bottles of brandy.

During the election of 1886 the King plied the voters with copious supplies of cheap gin which passed through the Custom House duty free because of royal franking privileges. The electorate dutifully if not soberly returned a slate of legislators loyal to the king and his cronies. This legislature passed a bill allowing the king to issue a license allowing the importation of opium. Kalakaua sold the license to a Chinese merchant for $71,000, then assigned the license to another bidder instead and pocketed the first man’s money. Chinese workers had brought the drug to Hawaii. In his book Pau Hana (“After Work”), Ronald Takaki describes how workers used the drug to alleviate the tedium of work in the fields: “A Chinese plantation worker recalled how the cook for his gang would bring their hot lunches to the field in a bucket: ‘In the top of the bucket was a little paper or envelope with the dope in it. All the men . . . took their dope that way with their dinner.’ ”

Many members of the Anglo-Saxon elite on the island were the children of missionaries. Is it surprising that they would bridle at this level of corruption, particularly when it interfered with their business interests? The “bayonet constitution” of 1887 by which they seized power took away most of the Merrie Monarch’s prerogatives, creating a constitutional monarchy, the real upshot of which was to solidify power in the hands of the missionaries and haole industrialists.

For all his flaws, the King left a great legacy to his people and has won an unshakeable place in their hearts. The rediscovery of Hawaiian culture has been gathering steam since the 1960s and ‘70s, producing beautiful dance, music, and traditional crafts, as well as giving younger generations pride in their heritage.

In 1893, two years after King Kalakaua’s death, his successor, Queen Liliʻuokalani, would be deposed and the monarchy abolished. In 1895, for her alleged part in a failed counter-revolution, a military tribunal sentenced Liliʻuokalani to five years of hard labor in prison and fined her $5,000. But the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in an upstairs bedroom of ‘Iolani Palace. While confined there, she composed songs, including The Queen’s Prayer (Ke Aloha o Ka Haku) and started writing her memoirs.

When the King and other ali’i, or nobility, visited Hilo they stayed in Nilolopua, a royal compound on the mauka or upland side of the park—the side of the park toward the mountain. King David Kalakaua presented the city with a sundial that still stands in the park. In the old days sailors and townspeople set their watches by it. On the site of Nilolopua now stands the former Hilo Hotel, a hideous essay in 1950s Modernist style, now dilapidated and uncared-for, its air conditioners rusted out, screens torn. The asphalt of its parking lot is broken and crumbling. Weeds grow out of cracks in the pavement.

 

The Federal Building, built in 1917, is well-kept and its grounds are well groomed. It has suffered no decline during the century succeeding its foundation. Two wings were added in 1936 during the Roosevelt administration. They project forward from the main block of the building, forming a U-shaped surround whose white Doric columns front open balconies, or loggias, on three sides. The ground-level elevation and the one above it have imposing proportions and in every way deserve the noble framing of the big columns. The third floor is sized on the scale of an attic. These wings frame a little courtyard and fountain in the center that is roofed with glazed tile the color of ripe avocado—if the flesh of the avocado had a glossy sheen. A marble plaque attached to the front of one wing declares:

1936 Post Office

Henry Morgenthau

Secretary of Treasury

James A. Farley

Postmaster General

I like the stone eagles that stand above the windows. I like the bronze frogs that spout water into the fountain. I like the pebble mosaics, and the pennies that people have thrown into the fountain. I toss one in too, and make a wish.

Palm trees line up along both sides of the Federal Building, and magnolias have been planted in front. Every detail of the workmanship of this public building, its classical urns and brass and cast iron fittings, bespeaks a level-headed solidity. No expense has been spared, and yet nothing is ostentatious. It is a pleasure to post one’s mail here. The postal clerks’ windows open to breezes that blow up from the sea in the morning. Hawaii likes to live outdoors, even when going to the post office. At the foot of the palm trees on the makai (toward the sea) side of the building little bronze commemorative shields have been set into the ground. Here are three of them:

James Nahale, Died at Front

Thomas Smith, Died at Front

James B. Todd Dead at Sea. Feb. 21, 1816

Across the way stands the East Hawaii Cultural Center, a pleasant hip-roofed Arts and Crafts structure whose leaded, mullioned windows look out over the park, where a huge banyan tree trails its hanging fronds to the ground. Along the makai side of the park runs a rectangular pond where water lilies grow—a monument to Hawaiian servicemen who died in WWII. As one sits on a park bench and looks across the park’s barbered lawn, the eye falls on an octagonal window fitted into one wall of the Art Deco Carlsmith Building, with baby palm trees softening its geometrical symmetry. Structures like the Federal Building, the East Hawaii Cultural Center and the Carlsmith Building, all of them in the Kino’ole Street part of town, went up when civic pride among the ruling class was the order of the day in Hilo, when there was no lack of sugar money for building, when the orderly, sober Anglo-Saxon oligarchy that had deposed the Hawaiian royal family called the shots and got rich.

Further down, facing the makai side of the Federal Building, are two more fine buildings. One of them is the pink, blue-roofed C.C. Kennedy Annexe, once part of the Waikea Sugar Mill. C.C. Kennedy was manager of the mill and a philanthropist. The annexe’s staunch postage-stamp-sized portico fronts a solid, one-story building, pink, with round-headed windows. Its tin roof, painted the color of periwinkles, is buttressed by a course of arching corbels that hold up the cornice. Down at the end of the street, past the white turrets of the old armory, now a gym, the bay glows emerald green or turquoise, depending on the changing moods of sea and sky.

One block closer to the Bay from the Federal Building stands the Naikodo Building, or Hilo Masonic Hall, built in the nineteen-teens. Like the Federal Building, this solid citizen employs the Renaissance Revival style. Round-headed windows face all around from its second and third stories—distinguished looking and tall, with octagonal mullioned lights at the top of each window. A granite stairway with a carved oak balustrade leads from the lobby to the second and third floors. At one time a roof garden with a view of the bay topped the Masonic Hall.

During Hawaii’s years as a U.S. territory, when fortunes were being made on the Hamakua Coast’s sugarcane plantations, the Masons who built this edifice ruled the roost. John Troup Moir (1859–1933), manager of the Onomea sugar plantation in Papaikou, near where I live, was master of the lodge. At the dedication ceremony in 1910, Moir announced that he had fired one architect and hired another because the first one was skimping on the quality of the materials. “Nothing but the best would satisfy the boys,” he assured his listeners, and called the Masonic Building “a substantial, fireproof, earthquake-proof, up-to-date building, first class in every respect, a credit to the town of Hilo and the Territory of Hawaii.”