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One of Honolulu’s most beloved and historic gathering places, McCoy Pavilion in Ala Moana Park, has been shuttered for more than five years.

The pavilion, the long-time home of spirited cultural festivals, art exhibitions and sometimes-heated community meetings, has been vacant since 2019 while undergoing renovations. The black mesh construction fabric on the perimeter has grown tattered with age, and city signs highlighting the work in progress are splashed with graffiti. It looks abandoned.

Now the city says the pavilion could be open again early next year.

But people who love McCoy Pavilion say this has gone on way too long.

“It’s basically been closed for five years, which is crazy,” said John Farmer, a retired lawyer and art historian who lives nearby. “It’s a wonderful gathering place for the public. There are so few places like that now that it’s a tragedy.”

Bruce Lum, a leader of the group called a civic group that came together in 2019 to fight controversial redevelopment plans during the administration of Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell, said Oahu residents miss it.

“A lot of groups depended on it for a number of years,” he said.

McCoy Pavilion sits at the ewa side of Ala Moana Park, the most popular park in Hawaii, a green recreational oasis on the waterfront at the edge of Honolulu’s dense urban core. The plans for Ala Moana, known as the People’s Park, were initiated in the 1920s amid the civic beautification movement, with its improvements funded by the federal government as part of the New Deal initiative to provide unemployment relief during the Great Depression. Almost 1,000 people, many taken from relief rolls, were employed there, laboring on a 76-acre slice of manmade land dredged from the coral reef.

“The park is the crowning achievement of the golden age of Honolulu park-building during the 1930s, an attractive and functional urban space created in Depression-era America,” wrote historian written in 1987. “From the beginning it was to be a park for all the people. It grew as a result of the massive federal experiment with public works projects during the Great Depression and survives as a monument to the ingenuity, imagination and perseverance of local park proponents.”

McCoy Pavilion began life as a set of structures known as the sports pavilion and banyan court, completed in 1937. It included a recreation center with rooms for crafts and games and locker facilities, according to news reports at the time. It was decorated by New Deal artists Robert Lee Eskridge, who painted two wall-sized murals of Hawaiian sports activities, and sculptor Marguerite Blasingame, also featuring stylized Hawaiian figures. An adjacent courtyard, inspired by a postcard of a Balinese garden, featured intricately detailed stone planters.

In the 1970s, philanthropist Hazel Corning McCoy made a $1.1 million donation to the complex in honor of her husband, Lester McCoy. McCoy was a grocery magnate from Illinois who retired to Hawaii and chaired the Honolulu park board from 1931 to 1941 for a salary of $1 a year, according to Weyeneth.

She asked that the property be made available to the public. City officials decided to allow alcoholic beverages to be served there.

The complex was renovated and a large auditorium, a dining hall, a kitchen, a dressing room, indoor and outdoor stages and an open outdoor lanai area were added, according to news reports. The newly conceived property reopened in 1975, with the first official event being a fundraiser for Aloha United Way that drew 250 businesspeople. McCoy Pavilion hosted hundreds of events in the decades that followed.

The annual Okinawan festival was first launched there in 1981, and the pavilion housed the Hawaiian Scottish Association’s yearly gathering, as well as celebrations of Greek and Hispanic cultures. Japanese toy demonstrations were held there, and so were ice cream socials. Cat fanciers gathered there, and so did biking enthusiasts.

McCoy Pavilion was first shut down in 2019 when the air-conditioning went bad, according to city officials, who said at the time they expected the work to take about a year to complete.

The air conditioning problem, particularly in the auditorium, was really serious, Lum recalled.

In the evening, “it was warm but we could bear it,” Lum said, but in the day, “it was pretty hot, it was unbearable.”

But as the air-conditioning work was underway, the coronavirus pandemic struck and most city facilities shut down. City officials also came to realize that there were larger structural problems and they decided to move ahead on those repairs as well, they said.

“Rather than reopen the pavilion for a few months in-between projects (during which time we likely would not have been able to use it for public purposes) we decided to keep it closed until the next projects began,” Nathan Serota, spokesman for the city Department of Parks and Recreation, said in an email.

The biggest issue, they found, was that tree roots from the banyan trees had spread laterally across the property and were causing significant structural damage, he wrote.

That’s because the entire park is built on reclaimed land where the subsurface soil is very shallow and sits on top of a coral shelf, Serota explained. The groundwater is only 4 feet under the surface, so the tree roots grew great distances to get water, threatening the courtyard, auditorium and assembly areas and park offices.

In addition to repairing the root damage, the city is renovating the pavilion’s gates, walkways and administrative buildings. Crews are making repairs to the historic portico entrance on the west side of the pavilion and restoring art there. They are making improvements to the auditorium’s 40-year-old lighting and audiovisual system, installing a new lighting system, repairing the electrical and mechanical infrastructure, adding a new fire alarm system and installing new roofing in two areas, Serota wrote.

Another problem, however, still remains, he noted. The ponds in the Banyan Courtyard are leaking.

Serota said the city hopes to have the last of the current projects completed early next year and will put off the pond work until later.

“We appreciate the patience and understanding of Ala Moana Regional Park user and event organizers who have waited patiently for the reopening of this iconic facility,” he wrote.

But some regular park-goers say the work seems to be proceeding very slowly.

“I typically go running there in the morning, but I’ve never seen workers there,” Farmer said. “It’s not moving forward as fast as it could be moving forward.”

It was a blow to the Hawaiian Scottish Association when members learned in 2019 that the city was closing the pavilion for repairs. They loved having their annual festival there.

“It was amazing,” said Jeremy McOuat, former chieftain of the Hawaiian Scottish Association.

McOuat said they shifted sites to Waikiki’s Jefferson Elementary School. He said state education department officials have been welcoming but they can’t serve alcohol because it is a school-owned property. They are eagerly awaiting their return to McCoy.

“Usually with a Scottish festival, there’s beer,” he said. “We’d love to utilize that space again.”