Next up we're visiting downtown Honolulu's Grover Cleveland Park, named after the rather obscure 19th century president.
Cleveland is honored by a park in Hawaii for a rather unusual reason. He took office shortly after the 1893 coup that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. Cleveland strongly opposed the coup and refused to annex the islands, following the scathing Blount Report on what had happened. As it turns out, Honolulu's Thomas Square is named for a similar reason. In that case, a British admiral who reversed an unauthorized seizure of the islands by an ambitious subordinate who did a bit of freelancing while Thomas was out of the area. Cleveland was succeeded in office by Republican William McKinley, who annexed the islands shortly after taking office and who -- controversially -- still has a high school named for him nearby.
Technically it's not really a city park, just a landscaped plaza with a fountain outside the state Attorney General's office and the Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, across the street from the state Supreme Court.
There aren't a lot of other parks and monuments dedicated to the memory of Grover Cleveland around the country, much less the world, but there's a much larger example located in Caldwell, NJ, his hometown.
The fountain in the middle of the plaza is titled Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa (The Eternal Legacy), created in 1994 by local artist Donald Harvey, who also did the similar Wave Flight at the airport. A public art walking tour brochure from the nearby Hawaii State Art Museum briefly describes the fountain:
The sculpture symbolizes Kamehameha the Great, Ruth Ke'elikolani, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the generous legacy they have left behind to the people of Hawai'i. Both women are suggested in the center form, inspired by the Hawaiian crab claw sail design. The three outer forms are an abstraction of the bows of ancient Hawaiian double-hulled canoes and sails.
And here's a Facebook video of the fountain running since I forgot to take one of my own.
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