Kalakaua Ave. Bridge

So here's a photoset of Honolulu's Kalakaua Avenue Bridge, a 1929 Art Deco structure over the Ala Wai Canal at the ewa end of Waikiki. Hawaii is famous for a lot of things, but an abundance of interesting bridges to look at is not really one of them. On O'ahu there's the one here, and the Rainbow Bridge up in Haleiwa on the north shore, and... that's about it. BridgeHunter has a whole page of links for the island, but most of the others are either small and utilitarian, or aren't bridges at all; there are a few tunnels listed (like this one for example), which is not unusual for the site, but they also list the Koko Crater Trail, an abandoned railway that -- as cool and fun as it is -- is in no way a bridge or a tunnel.

In 2014 the state conducted a fairly exhaustive study of potentially-historic bridges around the state, because -- as the introduction chapter explains -- federal transportation money is tied to having done an evaluation like this, and a previous attempt in 2008 was incomplete and had not been done correctly, and an earlier effort in 1983-1990 was now outdated and its results had been inconsistent between islands. And this was at a time when the state was trying to lock down a few extra billion dollars from the feds for Honolulu's upcoming light rail system, so there was a lot riding on getting the job done properly this time. So the O'ahu chapter of the study comes to 451 pages (although this number again includes a few tunnels along with the bridges; no Koko Crater Trail though). The Kalakaua Avenue Bridge part starts on page 338 and explains that this overly-swanky bridge helped persuade people that Waikiki -- which had been a swamp a few short years earlier -- was now highly desirable real estate. We're told that the bridge originally had globe-shaped street lights at either end, but these had been removed at some unknown date, and despite this alteration the bridge had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1985.

The study mentions elsewhere that there's another NRHP bridge over on the windward side of the island: The He'eia Viaduct (near He'eia State Park) dates to 1921, is 892 feet long, and (according to a 1986 history paper) was the longest bridge in the state for decades afterward. And I've been over it any number of times on a bus without noticing it. Was I really staring at my phone every single time passing through here? Or am I really that unobservant? Or both? In any case, it's on one of my many todo lists now, so I may pay it a visit at some point if the global pandemic ever goes away.