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Michael Brestovansky

Government & Politics

Business & Tourism

All flights out of Hawai‘i airports are grounded until further notice amid a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a national ground stop this morning, preventing all flights on the ground from taking off “due to extraordinary circumstance and reasons for safety.”

The Hawai‘i Department of Transportation reiterated that announcement at 11:30 a.m., advising passengers aboard flights scheduled to depart Hawai‘i airports today to check with their air carriers for direction. Aloha State Daily reached out to Hawaiian Airlines for comment.

International flights “will be managed on a case-by-case basis,” HDOT announced.

The specific cause for the grounding has not been disclosed, although U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy 

 that there was “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” and that FAA technicians are investigating the issue.

This is the first nationwide grounding of U.S. flights since 

, when an outage to a air traffic control notification system caused the FAA to halt all departures for about 90 minutes. Before 2023, the 

Daniel k inouye international airport hnl 100925

<title>All Hawai‘i flights grounded amid nationwide ground stop</title>

Passengers are advised to check with their air carriers for direction.

All Hawai‘i flights grounded amid nationwide ground stop

All flights out of Hawai‘i airports are grounded until further notice amid a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a national ground stop this morning, preventing all flights on the ground from taking off “due to extraordinary circumstance and reasons for safety.” The Hawai‘i Department of Transportation reiterated that announcement at 11:30 a.m., advising passengers aboard flights scheduled to depart Hawai‘i airports today to check with their air carriers for direction. Aloha State Daily reached out to Hawaiian Airlines for comment. International flights “will be managed on a case-by-case basis,” HDOT announced. The specific cause for the grounding has not been disclosed, although U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on social media that there was “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” and that FAA technicians are investigating the issue. This is the first nationwide grounding of U.S. flights since Jan. 2023, when an outage to a air traffic control notification system caused the FAA to halt all departures for about 90 minutes. Before 2023, the previous nationwide grounding took place on 9/11.

Crime & Courts

A 2022 Honolulu slip-and-fall case will go to the state Supreme Court over claims of “systemic bias” in Hawai‘i's judicial system.

Four years ago, Hye Ja Choi allegedly slipped and fell in a pool of water in the lobby of her condo building. Claiming to have incurred severe physical injuries to her neck, back and arms, she sued the building management company and condo owners’ association.

But on Thursday, the state Supreme Court approved a request to review the case, after Choi accused the state Intermediate Court of Appeals of violating her due process rights.

In her request to the Supreme Court, Choi called the case “a catastrophic breakdown of federal and state constitutional protections,” as she claimed she was not fairly provided support in court as a non-English speaker.

Choi — whose request to the Supreme Court was, she claimed, “translated using a machine” — claimed that a judge, Lisa Cataldo, repeatedly interrupted her during her own oral arguments before dismissing the case. When Choi appealed the dismissal, she found that the official written court transcript reportedly omitted her own statements and included only those of the judge and the defendants.

Choi also claimed that her court-appointed interpreter’s translations in court conflicted with the official record, but when she requested that the Appeals Court review the official transcript, cross-referenced against the official audio recording of the hearing, the court denied that request, and ultimately upheld the circuit court’s dismissal.

In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Choi wrote that she had been “forced into a structural trap”: her income was too high to qualify for free legal aid, but she claimed that the vast majority of Hawai‘i attorneys would refuse consultation requests from non-English speakers.

Because of this, Choi argued that she had been denied equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

“A [low-English-proficiency] litigant, who must meticulously translate, review, and draft complex pleadings from a foreign language, requies seven to eight times longer than a native English-speaking attorney to execute identical procedural tasks,” Choi wrote. “Yet, the Hawai‘i judiciary provides no compensatory legal protections or time modifications for language access, transforming standard procedural timetables into an administrative trap engineered to force automatic, non-merit dismissals of minority victims.”

She also claimed that the Appeals Court’s refusal to verify the record violated U.S. Supreme Court mandates requiring states to provide reliable and accurate transcripts to disadvantaged litigants.

Choi urged the Supreme Court to remand her case to a full trial before a newly assigned judge, or else, she warned, the case would establish a precedent signaling that the state “permits a closed network of lower court judges and corporate defense counsel to systematically purge non-English-speaking litigants from the justice system.”

While the Supreme Court on Thursday approved Choi’s request to review the case, the court also ordered that no oral arguments will be heard in the case, although either party can request to still hold oral arguments at an unspecified future date.

Aliiōlani Hale

<title>Slip-and-fall case goes to state Supreme Court over 'systemic bias'</title>

State judicial system prejudiced against non-English-speaking litigants, claims plaintiff.

Slip-and-fall case goes to state Supreme Court over 'systemic bias'

De Soto 2025

DeSoto Brown

Columnists

Hawai‘i History

Kakaʻako continues to change dramatically. How did this story get started? It may seem unlikely that the origins of how Kakaʻako looks today could go back to the 19th century, but that’s the truth. Here’s the background.

Back in 1853, an American man named Curtis Perry Ward arrived in Honolulu. He was originally from Kentucky, had moved to San Francisco and then continued west to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He went into business with a transport company using horse-drawn wagons to move cargo from the docks in Honolulu. When the American Civil War began in 1861 he was a supporter of the Confederacy — the states that seceded from the Union to be able to continue the system of slavery — but he also chose to become a citizen of the nation of Hawaiʻi at this time, as well.

In 1865, he married Victoria Robinson. Her mother Rebecca was one-half Hawaiian, and Rebecca’s father James Robinson had been an English shipbuilder who’d come to Hawaiʻi in 1822. Victoria, like her eight siblings, all had spoken Hawaiian as their first language, which was standard at the time of her birth in 1846.

Curtis and Victoria Ward gradually purchased various properties in what’s now the central part of Honolulu until they had a spread of at least 80 acres. They ran this as a farm that included a productive fishpond, and they also had fishing rights offshore of what’s now Kewalo Basin. An artesian well was drilled that provided ample fresh water pumped by a windmill for the grand home that they built. This elegant two-story structure, completed in 1881, had porches on both floors and was topped on the roof by a small viewing platform protected by a delicate pergola. It was named “Old Plantation” — not, as you might imagine, as a reference to the sugar plantations which were then abundant in the Hawaiian Islands, but instead in honor of the plantations of the American south where Curtis Ward had been born. Not a positive association, sadly, since Ward continued to hold an attachment to the Southern slavery-based society of his origin.

The Ward family grew to encompass seven daughters who were born from 1867 to 1881. The next year, however, Curtis Ward died at the age of 53; his oldest daughter was only 15 years old. But the widowed Victoria Ward stepped up to continue to run her properties, showing strong ability in both finance and business. She and her daughters were supporters of Queen Liliuokalani after the latter was overthrown in 1893, and Victoria notably had a Hawaiian flag placed as a canopy over her bed, supported by the bedposts. She said she had been born under this flag and would die under it, which eventually occurred in 1935.

Business-smart Victoria Ward and some of her daughters were fond of filing lawsuits. One significant such incident began in 1927 as the City & County of Honolulu was working on what was considered a necessity for Honolulu, that being the construction of a new cross-town street to relieve traffic congestion (whatever that was considered to be at that time) on King Street. The first segment of the planned Kapiʻolani Boulevard was to extend from King and South Street to Sheridan Street, but this would take the new 100-foot wide thoroughfare through 2 ¼ acres of the Old Plantation grounds. By December 1927, only four pieces of private property were still in the way of proceeding, and two of these were Ward-owned. In March 1928, a price of $38,714 for the condemnation of the Old Plantation segment had been set and was to be paid to Mrs. Victoria Ward in October, but she appealed to the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court in November 1929. The latter court upheld the decision the following month and $41,936 (including $3,222 interest earned during the legal proceedings; a total of over $800,000 today) was finally presented to Victoria’s lawyer on December 31, 1929. All pau? Nope! She’d already filed another suit claiming damages for land along the new Kapiʻolani Boulevard landfill, which was at a lower “unfilled” level, but this was dismissed.

Of the seven Ward sisters, four were married, but only two had any children. It was these descendants who bore the last names of Wodehouse and Hustace who eventually would come to run Victoria Ward Ltd., the entity formed in 1930 that managed the Ward Estate land in Kakaʻako until the property was sold to General Growth in 2002.

Victoria left the house and the land immediately around it to her three unmarried daughters who continued to live there. By the 1950s, surrounded by a high green wooden fence, the property was overgrown and shut off from the enlarging city around it. Lucy died in 1954; sisters Kathleen and Kulamanu succumbed in 1958 and 1959 after years as hospital-bound invalids. This left only the last surviving sister Lani Booth, divorced since the 1940s, living in a separate house on the same property.

Meanwhile, the City & County of Honolulu had been eyeing this large piece of land in this desirable location. It filed a legal notice of condemnation in October 1956 and a year later paid $2,095,000 for Old Plantation. This finalized the change of ownership but city officials were initially refused entry to the grounds on Oct. 30, 1957, by a caretaker who insisted at least one month must be allowed for the contents of the house to be moved out. Although plans for redevelopment were not yet completely set, the construction of a municipal auditorium was the most likely since the lack of such a facility was a notable problem at the time.

The residents of Honolulu were extremely curious about what this secretive spot looked like. To accommodate the thousands who wanted to enter, the Honolulu Academy of Arts (today’s Honolulu Museum of Art), located mauka of Old Plantation on the other side of Thomas Square, sponsored two public open houses in September and October of 1958. The charge was 90 cents for adults — the admission table quickly ran out of dimes to give in change for the many who paid $1, requiring a fast run to some banks in downtown Honolulu to get bags of 10-cent coins — and 25 cents for children under 12. The unkempt condition of the grounds meant that visitors had to sign legal waivers which acknowledged potential danger.

Inside the house, now emptied of Ward family possessions, jewelry store owner George Moody had arranged over 160 items of 19th century furniture and home decor from the Academy of Arts collection in several of the first floor rooms to give a feeling of its original appearance. Ladies of the Ka'ahumanu Society were present to oversee, along with Kamehameha School boys in their military uniforms. The Royal Hawaiian Band performed and the members of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel Girls Glee Club — now middle-aged and older women — sang nostalgic songs from the second-floor porch. Most important of these was the still-popular “Old Plantation,” a tune whose Hawaiian lyrics praise the beauty of this family home. People lined up to go inside, then strolled around the large pond makai of the house.

The public response was significant. Over 11,000 people visited on Sept. 20-21, followed by 5,500 on Oct. 25-26. Many of these were touched by this remnant of the 19th century that was still present in growing Honolulu and wished that it could be preserved as a public park. But it was already too late for that; a paved parking lot had already been installed on Ward Avenue across from Kapiʻolani Bowl (a bowling alley),and plans were in place for the City & County to earn income from leasing the 800-foot frontage on Kapiʻolani Boulevard for used car lots along with a potential amusement park (a “miniature Disneyland”) to occupy most of the rest of the 23.6 acres. Public opinion was strongly against all of this, and none ended up happening. The historic home was, however, demolished on Sept. 23, 1959. 

Still to come would be the widening of Ward Avenue that would slice off part of this land, along with the construction of what would initially be the Honolulu International Center.

[{"type":"text","text":"That’ll be an upcoming article to watch for. "}]

7 Kap Ward 1959

8 Kap Ward 2017 ca

1 Ward pond 1

<title>Changing Kakaʻako: The Ward family and their home, Part 1</title>

In 1881, Curtis and Victoria Ward built their grand home in Honolulu beside a fishpond and coconut tree grove, just makai of Thomas Square and McKinley High School today. ASD history columnist DeSoto Brown explores the generations that stewarded this place and how it impacted residents at the time. Still to come: How the widening of Ward Avenue would slice off part of this land, along with the construction of what would initially be the Honolulu International Center.

Changing Kakaʻako: The Ward family and their home, Part 1

Lopaka and Tanya Kapanui

Lopaka Kapanui and Tanya Kapanui

Mānoa Valley was once a heavily cultivated landscape, checkered with lo‘i kalo. The numerous streams that ran through the wide valley provided water for irrigating the fields, sustaining generations of Hawaiians. After Kamehameha I’s conquest of Oʻahu in 1795, the valley also became an important food source for his army.

In the early 19th century, portions of Mānoa were associated with aliʻi, including Kameʻeiamoku, his son Hoapili, and his granddaughter Liliha, who later married Boki, governor of Oʻahu. The couple maintained a residence in the valley, and Boki and a British business partner experimented with growing sugarcane and coffee there. By the mid-1800s, more than 30 landowners were recorded in the Mānoa area. Over the following decades, land ownership shifted, and more homes were built, yet some agricultural activity continued.

When the College of Hawaiʻi began acquiring land in Mānoa in 1907–1908, the property was far from empty. Small agricultural fields, some enclosed by stone walls, were being cultivated by Hawaiian and Chinese tenants. The university began clearing its newly acquired property in 1909, a process that continued for years.

In 1915, a large area of the developing campus was cleared and graded to create Cooke Field, the university’s first athletic facility. But Cooke Field was relocated in 1937 to make way for further campus development. Hemenway Hall was completed on part of the former athletic grounds in 1939. The remaining property would eventually become the site of a new university library.

Construction began in the mid-1950s, and the four-story reinforced-concrete building was completed in 1956. Originally called the New Library, it was named after Gregg M. Sinclair, the university's president at the time.

The building is well-known in campus folklore as a haunted location, with recurring student and staff reports of inexplicable events. An old newspaper editorial column interviewed a student who said she heard footsteps approach her stall in the basement restroom, but when she exited, no one was there. After reporting this to the librarian and some other students, they all went down to investigate, leaving someone to guard the door. They found nothing and no one in the restroom, but as they turned to leave, one of the stall doors suddenly slammed shut. This was followed by paper towels being yanked out of the dispenser by an unseen hand. The group of students and the librarian bolted for the door, nearly trampling the guard they left outside.

After we shared a video about the Sinclair Library on our social media, a man emailed us about his own encounter in the basement’s audiovisual room.

When Paul began studying music at the University of Hawaiʻi, he often found himself in the audiovisual listening lab at Sinclair Library. Although his classes required him to listen to hours of assigned recordings, he hated going down to the basement.

He couldn’t explain it, but something about the listening lab made him uncomfortable. The feeling was strong enough that when he found out that the library offered recordings, he jumped at the opportunity. This meant he could take the music with him and listen somewhere else, without having to spend hours in the lab.

Paul said that although the high-speed duplications were hard to listen to because of warbling and distortions, he still preferred that over listening in that basement room. In his email, he said he was curious whether other students or staff had the same experiences.

Another woman messaged us with a similar story. She said that looking back, she can’t say exactly what initially bothered her about the listening lab. There were no shadows and no figure lurking in the corner, and nothing she could point to as the source of her uneasiness. She simply knew she didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. One day, her nerves were seriously tested.

When she arrived one afternoon, she was relieved to notice another person sitting at one of the work stations. She chose a nearby station, placed her bag on the desk, leaning it against the partition. As she walked away, she heard a loud thump and turned to see her bag on the floor. When she looked in the direction of the other person, they were gone. No one stood up, and no one passed her. She didn’t hear any footsteps or shuffling.

At first, the woman just stared at her bag, trying to figure out how it could have fallen off the flat, level desk. She knew she didn’t put it at the edge. She decided to ignore what just happened and get to work. However, when she finally sat down to begin, she felt someone standing next to her and put their hand on her shoulder.

[{"type":"text","text":"“I never jumped so high,” she said."}]

There was no one in the room with her, but she is adamant that she distinctly felt the pressure of a hand on her shoulder.

Although the Sinclair Library is now closed as it undergoes a transformation into a new student-support center, we wonder whether the newly renovated space will also be haunted. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

Old Sinclair Library

<title>Uneasy Listening in the Sinclair Library</title>

Former University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa students recall strange and eerie experiences at Sinclair Library. Its A/V lab was especially troubling.

Uneasy Listening in the Sinclair Library

About 500 O‘ahu students packed into an auditorium Monday to hear a debate about whether elephants have human rights.

The Hawai‘i Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case revolving around the treatement of Mari and Vaigai, two elephants kept at the Honolulu Zoo. But instead of meeting at Ali‘iōlani Hale, students from 11 O‘ahu schools gathered at Punahou School to attend the hearing as part of the state Judiciary’s Courts in the Community educational outreach program.

The case could set a landmark precedent for animal rights, advocates said Monday.

“I think we’ll look back on this case as a time when history began to shift,” Brodie Hurtado, communications director for plaintiff Nonhuman Rights Project Inc., told Aloha State Daily.

The case revolves around whether the right to petition for a writ of 

 — the process by which a court must determine whether someone’s imprisonment is lawful — applies to Mari and Vaigai, wild-born elephants that have been held in captivity for more than 30 years each.

Jake Davis, attorney for NhRP emphasized that habeas corpus is handled in a case-by-case basis, and that the Supreme Court’s verdict does not necessarily mean all animals or all elephants in captivity must be freed. Instead, ruling in favor of the elephants simply allows their advocates to plead in a future hearing that the animals’ rights to bodily autonomy are being violated.

“The world’s foremost elephant scientists have established that Mari and Vaigai are autonomous,” Davis said. “Autonomy is the foundation of the right to liberty. Habeas corpus exists to protect an individual’s right to liberty …We are suggesting that autonomy in this case is sufficient for the recognition of the right [to liberty].”

Nonetheless, the justices grilled Davis on the potential ramifications of extending legal personhood to animals to this extent.

“There’s a lot of animals that have autonomy,” said Associate Justice Sabrina McKenna. “Don’t octopuses have autonomy? Are you going to at least limit it to mammals? Are you talking about reptiles, amphibians, insects? … The courts could be inundated with these requests, if we were to recognize this. We would have to set some sort of reasonable parameters.”

Davis countered that elephants are a special case in the animal kingdom, as the animals are known to have high cognitive capacities allowing for self-awareness, highly complex family and social dynamics, and the species’ famously extensive memory.

On the other hand, Deputy Corporation Counsel Patricia Sendao, speaking on behalf of the City and County of Honolulu, argued that the question of whether to grant human rights to animals is the sort of sweeping change that the state Legislature should decide, rather than the courts.

“This court looks backwards towards historical precedent for grounding and then, if necessary, will take incremental steps forward,” Sendao said, comparing the evolution of the law to the slow development of a coral reef. “But what is asked for here by NhRP is … a sweeping pronouncement that fundamentally alters our laws regarding animal welfare.”

While Davis argued that granting two elephants the right to appear at a single evidentiary hearing is “about as incremental … as can be had under the common law,” the justices also pushed back against the court’s supposed impotence. McKenna invoked the case of Rusty the orangutan, who was brought to Honolulu Zoo in 1997 after being held in a too-small enclosure in a New Jersey zoo.

“Are we to wait … if we had a situation like that?” McKenna asked. “You’re saying this court would be powerless, or the judiciary would be powerless to act even in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Associate Justice Todd Eddins briefly derailed the proceedings by invoking the 1960s cartoon “The Flintstones,” specifically the alien character The Great Gazoo.

“The Great Gazoo was an alien,” Eddins said, to laughs from the audience. “Let’s say there was an alien. An alien’s family came down … and they were confined. Would that alien ever be able to get out of confinement, just because we have restricted [habeas corpus] to persons?”

Sendao asserted that any such alien, not being a human, would not be entitled to habeas relief, and the court should not be able to determine otherwise.

“Would one habeas petition debated between two parties be the proper forum to decide how we interact with our new alien species, a new cognitive species brought to our planet for the first time?” Sendao said. “I would say no, we wouldn’t want that to be debated with one petition … We would want to the people of Hawai‘i to opine on a fundamental, monumental shift in our relationship to [living beings] in this universe.”

Aliens notwithstanding, the court took no action Monday and will deliver a verdict at an undetermined future date.

Punahou School senior Sofia Pomares Sotomayor said she thought the case was “fascinating” in part because of how freely and rapidly the attorneys and justices invoked not only disparate case laws and legal precedents, but also popular culture to make their points.

As part of the Courts in the Community program, attorneys visited Punahou and other schools to discuss the case ahead of time, with Pomares Sotomayor participating in a mock trial with her classmates prior to the hearing. Pomares Sotomayor, who played the part of an attorney advocating for the elephants, said the experience was valuable to understand how legal arguments are deployed in a real court setting.

While Pomares Sotomayor said she wants to pursue a law career after graduation, fellow Punahou senior Aletheia Uchida said the hearing was a good learning experience even for someone not looking to attend law school.

“Learning how to express yourself and argue your point, that’s a good skill to have,” Uchida said.

261109 KF Elephant Rights Supreme Court 0122 16x9

<title>Elephant rights go to Hawai‘i Supreme Court</title>

Hundreds in attendance in case over whether Honolulu Zoo elephants Mari and Vaigai are entitled to human rights

Elephant rights go to Hawai‘i Supreme Court

From March to July of 1961, Victoria Ward Ltd. — owner of more than 60 acres in Kaka‘ako — announced a new master plan for its property, along with the first substantial structure that was to be part of this redevelopment.

This plan called for the Ward property along Ala Moana Boulevard from Queen Street to Ward Avenue to eventually be the site of six highrise buildings of seven or more stories, various lowrise buildings of up to four stories, and several parking structures of at least two stories to be randomly intermingled. Mauka of this, extending up to Queen Street would be short office buildings facing Ward Avenue and Kamakee Street and light industrial structures and warehouses filling in the rest.

The new IBM Building at 1240 Ala Moana Boulevard would be the first structure of this master plan, which actually was never fully realized. Although it was named for the main commercial tenant which leased it, the building was developed by Victoria Ward in reality. It stood seven stories tall, including the penthouse which served as an employee lounge. In total there were 61,961 square feet of space and the estimated cost would be $1.5 million ($16.5 million in todayʻs dollars). Victoria Ward would occupy half of the sixth floor while IBM took the first two floors; the company then had 90 employees in Hawai‘i but it’s not known how many of these would be moved into this new home. Parking directly around the building would accommodate 70 vehicles but 250 more could be parked in the near vicinity, which at that time included open land along with used car lots.

One unexpected aspect of the IBM Building’s construction was very much a response to the world’s international situation at the time. In 1961 the United States and the USSR were still engaged in what was called the Cold War; a standoff between the two superpowers which were trying to promote their respective economic and political systems in different countries while competing with, and maneuvering against, each other. This competition saw both nations arming themselves with quantities of nuclear missiles aimed at the other, with the worrying threat of a catastrophic atomic war seemingly always possible. As the IBM Building’s construction was in its early stages in October 1961, it was proposed to add an underground nuclear shelter beneath its parking lot with a capacity of 300 people, but this was soon dropped partly because of the abundant ground water not far below the surface which would complicate the project. Ironically, one year after this would come the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the USA discovered that Russian nuclear missiles had been installed in Cuba. This led to a short but extremely intense period in which the United States imposed a military “quarantine” in the ocean around the island to prevent Russian ships from bringing in more armaments, and the potential for atomic war was frighteningly close. But the USSR backed down, war was averted, and the lack of a large shelter under the IBM Building turned out to not be a problem — fortunately.

The lead architect for the IBM Building was Vladimir Ossipoff, who by this time had established himself as probably Hawaii’s leading modern designer. Ossipoff had been born in Russia but then had moved with his family to Japan as a child, where his father was stationed in the Russian embassy. After the Russian monarchy was overthrown in 1917 the family never returned to their homeland and immigrated to the United States in 1923. Vladimir attended high school and college in California and after graduating with an architectural degree in the early 1930s during the Depression, moved to Hawaii where he was able to get a job. His career had grown steadily since then.

Ossipoff equipped the IBM Building with a remarkable exterior composed of concrete elements that he designed, and which were then manufactured locally before being installed. These formed what’s called a “brise soleil,” a French term for a sunshade, which still serve to reduce the glare of direct sunlight through large windows while also cutting cooling costs. Unique to just this single structure, the visually-striking concrete grille was more economical than one fabricated of metal, costing $3.50 per square foot vs $5 for the metal version. Many years later, Ossipoff’s business partner said the design for this exterior covering had been inspired by the appearance of what had been called “punch cards,” which were paper cards then used by IBM computers to carry information. These were well-known for having random patterns of rectangular holes that had been stamped into them.

In 2002, Victoria Ward Ltd, still a family-owned company, sold its Kaka‘ako property for $250 million to General Growth, which was an American real estate investment firm that specialized in owning and operating shopping centers. Its justification for the Kaka‘ako purchase was to possess and run Ward Warehouse and Ward Centre, the two shopping complexes located on this land. Six years later, in 2008, General Growth announced its own master plan for this land which called for the demolition of the IBM Building and pretty much everything else on the former Ward lands beginning in 2010.

Fans of Ossipoff and his work immediately objected, but many others saw its destruction as no big loss. Three people quoted in a 2008 newspaper article expressed indifference or open disapproval: “I don’t happen to think it’s particularly attractive…it’s not the best use for that location. If it’s going to be an office, you could have a newer, better office building on that site,” said Jamie Brown of Hawai‘i Commercial Real Estate. From Gary Gordon, construction superintendent: “It’s period architecture. Unfortunately, its time has come and gone, and it doesn’t blend in.” And from Francis Oda, chairman and CEO of Group 70 International architects: “It’s an interesting building but [Ossipoff did] better than that…[and] you can’t just have a knee-jerk reaction to preserve everything.” Apparently these three thought that nothing different from the multiple reflective glass towers we see in this location today should be present to interrupt the overall uniformity.

General Growth’s plan was never carried out. The company ran into financial problems and some of its assets were required to be spun off, leading to the 2012 switch in the ownership of the former Ward property to the Howard Hughes Corporation. Fortunately, the latter decided that the IBM Building was worthy of preservation and on February 1, 2013 began a $24 million renovation and revamp of it. The remodeled ground floor would house the publicly accessible scale model of the planned redevelopment of this portion of Kaka‘ako; this has been in place since 2014 and is still there today in 2026. The model has, of course, been changed over this 12-year period since the original target of 22 residential towers has been reduced in number.

We can be grateful that short-sighted dislike of “outdated buildings” which can lead to the loss of structures that could never be replicated today, due to costs or the lack of workmanship expertise to do the work, did not claim the IBM Building more than 15 years ago. It will continue to stand as a physical artifact of what Kaka‘ako once was.

1 IBM 67 16x9

<title>Changing Kaka‘ako: The IBM Building</title>

At one time, the plan for the IBM Building included a basement bomb shelter in case of nuclear war. Later, the building faced destruction from a more ordinary source — changing ownership and redevelopment plans. Fortunately, writes ASD history columnist DeSoto Brown, it has been preserved, even as the neighborhood around it changes drastically.

All Hawai‘i flights grounded amid nationwide ground stop

Michael Brestovansky

Government & Politics Reporter

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All Hawai‘i flights grounded amid nationwide ground stop

Authors

Michael Brestovansky

Government & Politics Reporter

More in Government & Politics

AIDS Memorial coming to Kakaʻako Waterfront Park

Yacht owners, state, reach $375,000 settlement over 2023 grounding incident

Elephant rights go to Hawai‘i Supreme Court

Perseverance propels this Kailua elementary school’s facilities project forward

Most read