Couple of photos of Honolulu's Portland Building. The name surprises me, and I've yet to determine whether it refers to our Portland, or to some other place, company, person, or thing. A survey of historic buildings of Hawaii mentions it briefly (all typos are theirs):
Portland Building -Constructed in 1903 at South Hotel and Union Mall in Honolulu, in the architectural style of the the Portland Building is the Late Victorian period.
Oregon has a handful of Hawaiian place names, including the Portland suburb of Aloha, and the Owyhee River in the far SE corner of the state. So I suppose it's not unreasonable to have something in Hawaii named after something in Oregon. Still seems peculiar, though.
3 comments :
That's interesting. I just read "Unfamiliar Fishes" and it makes me wonder what exactly the Portland connection might be! (Or if it's for Maine, given the number of Congregationalists who were missionaries in Hawaii.)
Just to the right of that picture, there is a panel with the name "OREGON," so as to end any mystery about which Portland. I am trying to find out more about this building.
A lot of businessmen (and they were almost exclusively men) came from the west coast of the US, they built buildings they knew, or were of a style popular at home—-look up the site-horrendous Alexander Young building, which was covered in a gray sandstone much more appropriate to fog bound San Francisco (where it’s owners hailed from and where there’s a near doppelgänger still standing on Montgomery St today) than sunny tropical Honolulu. Eventually a more appealing Asian/Tropical style emerged in Honolulu, while others (like the Old Post Office) echoed a Pacific Colonial style you can also see from SIngapore to Queensland Au. Even Iolani Palace was designed by a SF architect, hence the stiff victorian look, which was then to be replaced by the even less appropriate palace across the street where the King Kamehameha statue stands today.
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