Aaron Laipply, 2005 I surf at Kaisers sometimes toward the end of the day. At sunset I would turn away from the sea and look toward Waikiki. I'd see hundreds of camera flashes go off. The people in the hotels would be taking photographs of the sunset. Sometimes a number of flashes would go off at the same time from different spots. I think about how these people, total strangers from each other, would just happen to take a picture of exactly the same things at the exactly the same second. Later, if they ran into each other on the street below their hotels, they would not know. I also think about how all these hundreds of people would also have a picture of me, occupying this tiny little micron of photo sensitive light in their photographs. |
In 1954, Henry J. Kaiser and Fritz Burns purchased 8 acres of Waikiki beachfront property from the John Ena Estate and several adjoining properties, including the Niumalu Hotel. Their intent was to build the first self-contained visitor resort in Waikiki. In mid-1955 the first increment of the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel opened for business. Kaiser then dredged a channel, the Kaiser Channel, through the reef to allow access to the beach for commercial catamaran tours. The surf site is on the west margin of the Kaiser Channel. In 1961, Conrad Hilton bought the resort for $21.5 million. It is now called the Hilton Hawaiian Village, but the name Kaiser's for the surf site has not changed. (from John Clark's Hawai'i Place Names)  |
