Time To Tear Down The Natatorium

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Wednesday - November 10, 2010

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To: Mayor Peter Carlisle: Here’s hoping one of your early decisions will be to tear down that crumbling, ugly, beach-hogging Waikiki Natatorium.

It’s been closed since 1979. In 2001, we spent about $5 million renovating the facade and bleachers but did nothing with the pool, and so it remains closed.

A memorial to our World War I dead? OK, but an architecturally insignificant one designed by the insignificant San Francisco Beaux-Arts architect Louis Hobart.

We have a WWI memorial, with all the names inscribed, by the King and Punchbowl bus stop. We sure don’t need a pool oceanside at one of our premier beaches with an exceptional swimming channel. And who’d vote to spend another $10 million these days fixing that one?

Contrary to the Historic Hawaii Foundation, preservation and revitalization is not the best course of action. Getting rid of it is. We need the beach space for families.

Demolition is the right way to go.

I hope you’ll offer that positive solution to the public in next week’s edition of MidWeek.

Did you read Derrick DePledge’s piece in the Star-Advertiser about Hope Chapel pushing “righteous” - meaning exceptionally religious - Christian candidates?

That did not translate to votes.

Duke Aiona got swamped. Blake Oshiro, who introduced the civil unions bill and has publicly come out as being gay, easily won.

When Gary Okino ran in the House primary, he said liberal Democrats “are working against everything that God has given us and expects from us ... what they intend to do at the Legislature will go against God’s values.” Okino got swamped.

Here’s something the still Democrat-dominated Legislature needs to keep in mind as it crafts a revived civil unions bill for governor-elect Neil Abercrombie’s signature - and he said in the campaign he would sign one (although he waffled a bit election night, saying we already have reciprocal benefits).

Britain doesn’t have same-gender marriage, but it has civil partnerships - same rights and responsibilities as marriage, different name to keep the naysayers from getting hysterical.

But the UK law specifies same-gender couples. Last week, along came Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, 26-year-old man and woman, and they applied for a civil partnership. Oops, can’t do that because you’re not a same-gender couple. So it goes to court. Big legal hassle.

Any twosome should be able to walk into the Department of Health, file a paper saying they’re not biological brother and sister or first cousins, have the paper stamped and filed, and they’re a legal couple.

President Obama consistently mispronounced her first name. Hawaii Reporter did two late-hit pieces on her. But Colleen Hanabusa pulled it off, and handily. Frankly, I was surprised. I thought Charles Djou was on a roll. But those “blue face” and “ugly face” ads may have done him in. You don’t do that in Hawaii.

Oh, well, he can tell his grandkids, “I was a congressman once, for seven months.” .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)