Built in 1901, this Hawaiian Gothic-style hotel, mixing elements of the Queen Anne, Classical Revival, Beaux Arts, and Renaissance Revival styles, was designed by Oliver G. Traphagen and built by the Lucas Brothers for Walter Chamberlain Peacock as the first large hotel on Waikiki.  Expanded in 1918 with the addition of two six-story concrete wings and a large rooftop addition on the original building, the hotel has changed scale and massing considerably from its original design, but maintains its original facade, roof, and decorative trim and ornament.  The first hotel on Waikiki, the Moana featured 75 guest rooms with bathrooms and telephone service, a main parlor, salon, billiard room, and library, and a main reception area on the first floor, a grand staircase, ionic fluted columns inside the main lobby, an electric elevator, and an open two-story portion of the lobby ringed by balustrades on the second floor, with the hotel being considered very modern and luxurious for its time.  In 1904, a banyan tree was planted in the courtyard on the ocean side of the hotel by Jared Smith, Director of the Department of Agriculture Experiment Station, which has since grown to be 75 feet tall and 150 feet wide.  The hotel proved a bit too ambitious for the investment Peacock had put into it, and it was sold to Alexander Young in 1905 after encountering financial difficulties.  Following Young’s death in 1910, the building became the property of the Territorial Hotel Company, founded by Young, which expanded the hotel with two wings in 1918, but went bankrupt during the Great Depression, with ownership then coming under the Matson Navigation Company.  Various famous guests stayed at the hotel over the years, including the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VIII in 1920, author Agatha Christie and her husband in 1922, and Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, whom mysteriously died of strychnine poisoning in the hotel, though her murder remains unsolved.  The original building features lots of classical Ionic columns, a hipped roof with broad overhanging eaves and brackets, clapboard siding, arched openings at the lanais with fleur-de-lis motif panels between them and supported by doric columns, decorative balustrades, one-over-one double-hung windows in singles and groups.  In the center of the building is a tower with oxeye windows below the main roofline, doric pilasters on the corners, a lanai on the sixth floor with arched openings and a long row of french doors, and a tall porte cochere in the center of the first and second floors of the tower with fluted ionic columns, a roofline wrapped with a decorative balustrade, and an architrave featuring festoons, dentils, and brackets.  The building also features lanais on the fifth floor below the roofline with decorative columns and sawn balustrades supported by brackets and featuring decorative trim, lanais with arched openings and sawn balustrades on the ends of the fifth floor of the original side wings, large arched openings at the base of the original side wings with large windows and juliet balconies, accented with circular panels featuring fleur-de-lis motifs, and crowned with another juliet balcony supported by columns, hipped dormers, and a multi-tier lanai on the rear of the building facing the ocean.  The hotel was expanded with two Renaissance Revival-style six-story wings on either side in 1918, which featured concrete construction and stucco-clad exteriors with arched and rectangular double-hung one-over-one windows with decorative trim surrounds, open staircases on the front and rear facades with arched exterior openings, juliet balconies, small ionic columns, brackets, and corner pilasters, a hipped roof with broad overhanging bracketed eaves, small rooftop towers with hipped roofs, and arched vents, and pilasters at the corners of the wings themselves, dividing the side facades into three segments.  After the construction of the wings in 1918, a large breezeway with double-hung windows making up most of the exterior was constructed across the ridge of the hipped roof of the original hotel building, running straight through the original building’s tower in the middle, which saw the addition of a similar rooftop tower with arched vents to the two 1918 wings.  The hotel was renovated multiple times in the 20th Century, with the loss of the original porte cochere, reconfiguration of the interior, and the addition of bungalows across Kalakaua Avenue in 1925, which led to the hotel becoming known as the Moana-Seaside Hotel &amp; Bungalows during the period between the 1920s and 1950s.  A new hotel, known as the Surfrider, was built immediately Diamond Head of the Moana Hotel by the Matson Navigation Company in 1952, which stood 8 stories tall, towering over the older hotel next door.  The hotel’s bungalows were demolished the following year and replaced by the Princess Kaiulani Hotel, with the Moana Hotel, Surfrider Hotel, and Princess Kaiulani Hotel being sold to Sheraton Hotels and Resorts in 1959.  The Moana Hotel and Surfrider Hotel were sold to the Kyo-Ya Company, led by Japanese industrialist Kenji Osano, in 1963, but remained under the Sheraton banner.  In 1969, a new and much taller Surfrider Hotel was built immediately Ewa of the Moana Hotel, with a new taller tower being added to the Princess Kaiulani Hotel in 1970.  After the completion of the new Surfrider Hotel, the old Surfrider, built in 1952, became the Moana Ocean Lanai, and later, the Diamond Head Tower of the Moana Hotel.  The Moana Hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.  In 1989, the Moana Hotel was restored under the direction of architect Virginia D. Murison to its 1920s exterior appearance, with the restoration of deteriorated exterior elements, interior common spaces, and reconstruction of the original porte cochere, as well as better integration of the historic hotel with the adjacent 1952 and 1969 buildings on either side.  Now known as the Sheraton Moana Surfrider, the resort maintained the historic charm of the original Moana Hotel and conserved the hotel’s iconic banyan tree, while boasting 793 modern guest rooms, a new pool, with the project winning many preservation awards.  The hotel has since been rebranded as the Westin Moana Surfrider Hotel.
w_lemay
CC BY-SA 2.0
<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/59081381@N03/52273134531/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/59081381@N03/52273134531/</a>