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Demolition has once again come to the heart of Keeaumoku Street. Very soon The Park at Keeaumoku will tower 400 feet over this low-key, low-rise neighborhood.

I arrived in 1974. For $12, I spent my first night at the 11-story Biltmore Hotel, built in 1959, the first high-rise in Waikiki. Later that year I watched the implosion bring her down to make way for the 42-story Hyatt Regency Waikiki.

I spent my last 52 cents on chili-rice from the snack shop by the beach. The next morning I joined other day-labor hopefuls at “Checkers & Pogos” in Kakaako. For eight hours of work, we earned $14.70, paid daily, unloading shipping containers and laboring at all kinds of small homegrown businesses all over Kakaako, Kapalama and Kalihi.

I moved to a rooming house on Beretania just down the street from Taniguchi Market. Monthly rent was $85. Back then I could get by on what little I earned.

My first full-time job was night-shift at a photo lab hidden among the bars and bistros along Keeaumoku Street, where twin towers will soon break ground.

We took our break at Diner’s Drive-In, where the Walmart parking lot is today. My co-worker introduced me to Kalua Pig & Cabbage, with ketchup. Sometimes we played Space Invader before heading back to work.

Up the block at Tanabe’s Superette, I had my first lau-lau, poke, and Spam musubi. Down at the bottom of the block was C.S. Wo’s furniture store with its little clock tower. In between and all around the area were small local businesses, the kind that built dreams and supported families, the kind where a new kid in town could get a fresh start.

Pig Pens Where Walmart Now Stands

Long before I came to town, long before there was a Diner’s Drive-In, there was a rice mill with attached workers’ quarters, a separate kitchen and a few pig pens nearby where the Walmart parking lot is today. The mill was powered by an elevated water flume that ran down from an artesian well on King Street between the Toyo Macaroni Factory and a “moving picture” theater.

At that time, Keeaumoku ended at King Street, Kapiolani Boulevard didn’t yet exist and Sheridan continued all the way down to the Ala Moana coastal road.

In those days, much of the area makai of King Street was lowland bordering wetlands, used to grow taro and rice, and there were fish and duck ponds, and banana groves and vegetable plots, and farmers and their families in small single dwellings or two and three unit row-houses, living determined, fragile lives.

In 1906, Massachusetts transplant Lucius E. Pinkham, president of the Territorial Board of Health, proposed reclamation of the Waikiki District. Using sanitation as justification, lands were acquired, tenants removed, dwellings destroyed, and the wetlands drained, filled and converted to higher-valued real estate.

Pinkham envisioned the area becoming home to a more “desirable population” those of “private fortune, who seek an agreeable climate and surroundings, and who expend large already acquired incomes rather than those who expect the community to furnish them the opportunity of earning a livelihood.”

By the time I arrived, the reclamation of Waikiki was ancient history. I didn’t realize then that development on Oahu was just beginning, that one day we would no longer see smoke rising from the cane fields in Ewa, that we would ever imagine we might lose the fight to keep the country, country, or that the thriving districts of small locally owned businesses and low-rise rentals that existed all over town would ever be at risk.

I never dreamed that one day high-rise luxury condos, built for everyone else but us, would block the trade winds and our view of the Koolau from the beach at Ala Moana.

In the midst of all the marketing jabber, we hear assurances of affordable, workforce housing.

The planners talk about confining high-rise development to an urban core. In the same breath they advocate transit oriented development along the entire 20-mile length of the rail. In the midst of all the marketing jabber, we hear assurances of affordable, workforce housing.

If the vast majority of all the units in all the rising condo towers all over town are market priced, designed and intended for the upper crust among us or those of independent means, where does that leave the real “work force” of Honolulu and our coming generations?

If Kakaako and “Mid-Town Ala Moana” provide the example of what is coming down the pike, there will continue to be dramatic, irreversible change to our community. Locally owned small businesses will close, workers will lose their jobs and neighborhoods will be changed forever.

I miss the Kalua Pig & Cabbage at Diner’s, and I’ll miss the oxtail soup at Asahi Grill, but most of all I’ll miss the low-key, low-rise, everyone-knows-everyone, caring community that I’ve known.