Stand on Kalākaua Avenue between the Royal Hawaiian and the Moana Surfrider and look mauka. A little over a century ago you would have been standing in a stream.
The ʻĀpuakēhau ran right through here, carrying Mānoa Valley water past taro patches, duck ponds, and rice paddies to the sea. Most of the land from the beach back to King Street was wet.
That Waikīkī fed chiefs for 400 years. Then, between 1921 and 1928, a dredge named the Kewalo cut a two-mile (3.2 km) channel across it. The streams were rerouted and the marsh was buried under coral rubble.
The resort we know sits on that fill. This is the story of what was here, who decided to drain it, and what the shortcut still costs us today.
Related: The Battle of Nuʻuanu: How Kamehameha Took Oʻahu in 1795 | ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom | The Chinatown Fire of 1900: How Honolulu Burned Down Fighting the Plague
Spouting Water
Waikīkī means “spouting water,” and the name was literal. Springs bubbled up through the flats, and three valleys drained into them: Makiki, Mānoa, and Pālolo. The marsh covered more than 2,000 acres (810 hectares), roughly four times the size of the Waikīkī we walk today.
The streams changed names as they came down onto the plain. The Piʻinaio met the ocean at Kālia, out where Fort DeRussy and the Hilton Hawaiian Village stand now. The ʻĀpuakēhau emptied at Helumoa, between the Royal Hawaiian and the Moana.
The Kuekaunahi reached the sea at Hamohamo, near the corner of ʻŌhua Avenue and Kalākaua. The land between those three mouths was called Waikolu, “three waters.”
Water like that grows food. Beginning around the 1400s, Hawaiians shaped the marsh into loʻi kalo (irrigated taro terraces), ʻauwai (ditches), and loko iʻa (fishponds). It became one of the most productive places on Oʻahu.
The Chief Who Moved to the Marsh
Sometime in the 1400s the aliʻi nui Māʻilikūkahi moved Oʻahu’s seat of government to Waikīkī. He set Oʻahu’s land divisions in order, and the food coming out of these flats is a big reason the move worked.
His grandson Kalamakua gets credit for spreading the taro fields across the Waikīkī, Kapahulu, Mōʻiliʻili, and Mānoa lowlands. At Kālia, the two biggest fishponds were Kaʻihikapu and Pāweo.
Ponds like those were treated as living things. Samuel Kamakau, the 19th-century Hawaiian historian, wrote that moʻo, lizard guardians, watched over them; care kept the fish fat, and neglect brought punishment.
Tradition credits the chief Kākuhihewa with planting Helumoa, a coconut grove that grew to nearly 10,000 trees around the spot where the Royal Hawaiian sits today. When Kamehameha landed on Oʻahu in 1795, he camped his warriors near this grove before marching up Nuʻuanu Valley.
He came back to live at Waikīkī after the conquest and built a stone house at Puaʻaliʻiliʻi. When he later moved his court to Honolulu Harbor, Waikīkī’s roughly 400 years as Oʻahu’s capital came to an end.
The aliʻi never really left. Kamehameha V kept a home in the Helumoa grove, and that land passed to Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani and then to Bernice Pauahi Bishop, whose will created Kamehameha Schools. Queen Liliʻuokalani, Princess Kaʻiulani, and later Prince Kūhiō all kept homes here too.
Taro Gives Way to Rice and Ducks
After the Māhele of 1848 opened land to private title, Hawaiians kept farming Waikīkī, but on a shrinking scale as introduced diseases cut the population down.
In the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese immigrants coming off the sugar plantations leased the old loʻi and turned them into rice paddies. They raised fish and ducks in the ponds, and Japanese farmers followed later.
By 1892, Waikīkī had 542 acres (219 hectares) planted in rice, almost 12 percent of all the rice on Oʻahu. Into the early 1900s, roughly 85 percent of today’s Waikīkī was still under water: taro, rice, fishponds, and duck ponds.
The “Unsanitary” Argument
The push to drain all of this started with a law and a man. In 1896, three years after the overthrow, the Republic of Hawaiʻi passed Act 61. It let the Board of Health declare any land “unsanitary” and order the owner to fill it at their own expense.
If the owner could not pay, the government could do the filling and put a lien on the land.
Lucius E. Pinkham, a Massachusetts transplant who had managed the Dillingham family’s Pacific Hardware Company, became president of the Territorial Board of Health in April 1904. On February 21, 1906, he presented a 36-page plan calling the Waikīkī “swamps” a mosquito breeding ground, “deleterious to the public health.”
His fix was a canal to catch the streams before they reached the flats. The dredged material would fill the lowlands.
Pinkham said out loud what the plan was really for. In a 1906 letter he wrote that Honolulu wanted the kind of residents who made “Los Angeles and other towns of Southern California what they are.” He meant people “of private fortune” who spend money rather than earn it.
He promised a “Venice in the midst of the Pacific.” Without the canal, he complained, Waikīkī land would stay “of only agricultural value for rice and banana culture.” The Board approved the idea, and then nothing happened for seven years.
Historians still debate how much anyone believed the health argument. No disease outbreak had ever been tied to the Waikīkī marsh. What nobody disputes is that the canal was a real estate project first.
The Army Fills Kālia First
The federal government beat the Territory to the digging. In the first decade of the 1900s, the War Department took more than 70 acres (28 hectares) at Kālia for a coastal defense post, the future Fort DeRussy. Most of those acres were fishpond.
The Army pumped ocean fill for nearly a year to make solid ground. Today the Hale Koa Hotel and the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaiʻi sit on top of those buried ponds.
Digging the Ala Wai (1921 to 1928)
Pinkham got his chance in November 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed him Territorial Governor. He revived the canal plan and set a commission to work in 1917. In 1918 the Legislature put up $100,000 to start excavation and authorized the Superintendent of Public Works to acquire land.
Over the next two years the Territory took 161 acres (65 hectares) along an 800-foot (244 m) right of way. Most of it came through purchase or liens under the old sanitation law. By June 1920, 85 percent of it was in government hands.
In December 1920 the contract went to the Hawaiian Dredging Company, part of Walter F. Dillingham’s Oahu Railway and Land Company empire. Dillingham was no bystander.
In 1912 he had bought 84 acres (34 hectares) at the west end of Waikīkī from the Bishop Estate, plus 146 acres (59 hectares) at the McCully end. That land was worth far more dry than wet.
The dredge Kewalo started at the ocean end and chewed inland toward Kapahulu. By mid-1923 it had cut nearly 6,500 feet (2 km) of channel, about 135 feet (41 m) wide and 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 m) deep.
Lyman Bigelow, the Superintendent of Public Works, reported that year that the canal had “intercepted Apuakehau Stream which flowed by the Outrigger Club.” By 1924 the cut reached Kapahulu Avenue at 150 feet (46 m) wide.
Then it got wider. The 1923 Legislature paid to add another 100 feet (30 m), officially so the canal could host “boat racing, water carnivals, etc.” In practice, the extra dredging produced the fill that reclaimed the McCully tract, the big block of pond fields on the mauka side that Dillingham owned.
Dillingham also sold canal spoil to builders, who needed it because the city required new Waikīkī buildings to sit above sea level. By mid-1927 the canal was 250 feet (76 m) wide almost to Kapahulu. In 1928 the Kewalo backed out of the channel and the job was done.
The name came in 1925, when the City Planning Commission asked residents to suggest a Hawaiian name for the “Waikiki drainage canal.” Jennie Wilson, wife of Mayor John H. Wilson, offered Ala Wai, “waterway.”
Of the twelve names sent in, the commission called hers the most euphonic, and a planning engineer insisted the mayor’s wife had nothing to do with the choice.
Before reclamation, Waikīkī farmland was assessed at about $500 an acre. Filling it cost roughly ten cents a square foot, or $4,350 an acre, and reclaimed lots then sold for $6,500 to $7,000 an acre.
What Happened to the Farmers
For landowners waiting to build, the canal was a gift. For the people farming the flats, it was the end. The 1896 law required them to pay for filling their own plots, and most could not, so many lost their livelihood and their land in the same stroke.
One letter survives from a farmer named Chang Fow, who wrote to his landlord, Bishop Trust Company, as the fill crept toward his farm. Salt water seeped from the newly filled lots into his ponds and killed the fish. His 500 ducks ate the dead fish and died at 20 to 30 a day until only about 100 were left.
His chickens ate the worms off the duck carcasses and died too. He had six children to feed.
Read that again and picture how many families worked this flat. Then walk down Kalākaua and notice how few of their names are on anything. The Waikīkī Historic Trail markers we mention below are the closest thing to a memorial they have.
The Outlet That Never Got Dug
Pinkham’s design had two mouths. The canal was supposed to continue east past Kapahulu, through the old Makee Island lagoon in Kapiʻolani Park, and out to sea near Kaimana Beach. Water would flush through from both ends.
In 1924 the Territory shelved that leg “at some later date, when funds are made available.” Engineers also worried that an eastern outlet would send the canal’s discharge riding the current back along Waikīkī Beach, right in front of the new hotels. The funds never came, and the Ala Wai has been a dead-end ditch ever since.
A dead end does not flush. Sediment settled, and a canal dug 10 to 25 feet (3 to 7.6 m) deep now averages 6 to 10 feet (1.8 to 3 m). Rainstorms sent it over its banks in 1965 and 1967, and again during Hurricane ʻIniki in 1992.
The state dredged it in 1967, 1978, and 2002. Part of the 2002 muck tested too toxic to dump at sea and went to fill at the airport instead.
A 1976 Department of Health report found the water regularly failed bacteria limits, and in 1991 the state posted signs warning people not to swim.
In March 2006 a sewer main broke. The city diverted roughly 48 million gallons (180 million liters) of raw sewage into the canal to keep it out of hotels and homes. Waikīkī beaches closed for days.
About a week later, a 34-year-old man fell into the Ala Wai Boat Harbor and died of a bacterial infection.
The flood risk has only grown. The Ala Wai watershed covers 19 square miles (49 sq km) and climbs from sea level to about 3,000 feet (914 m) in roughly four miles (6.4 km).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers figures the canal can hold roughly a 5- to 10-year flood before it tops the walls. A major storm could put parts of Waikīkī under five feet (1.5 m) of moving water.
The Corps and the City signed on to a re-evaluation study in 2021 and published a draft plan in November 2023. As we write this, the fix is still on paper.
Since 2019, volunteers have tossed more than 300,000 “genki balls,” mud balls seeded with microorganisms, into the canal to eat the sludge. Whether they work is disputed; researchers at Hawaiʻi Pacific University published studies in 2025 questioning whether they do anything at all.
The Hotels Move In
The resort era did not wait for the dredge. The Moana Hotel opened on March 11, 1901, with 75 rooms and the first electric elevator in the Territory. But the big money arrived once the ground was dry.
The Royal Hawaiian opened on February 1, 1927, while the Kewalo was still working the canal behind it. Matson Navigation built it on 15 acres (6 hectares) of the old Helumoa grove: 400 rooms, Spanish-Moorish arches, painted pink. More than a thousand guests came to the black-tie opening.
The Honolulu Advertiser ran a 16-page spread in 1928 headlined “The Whole World Knows Waikiki.” Annual visitor counts jumped from about 8,000 to more than 17,000.
Waikīkī stayed a real neighborhood for decades: cottages, duplexes, a barber, a cleaners, kids crabbing off the canal wall with aku heads for bait. The high-rises came in the 1960s, and by 1980 Waikīkī had 35 hotels.
Finding the Old Waikīkī Today
Everything above is free to see, and most of it is a flat walk in slippers. Give yourself a slow morning rather than squeezing it between the beach and dinner, because the whole point is to stand in each spot and picture the water.
Start at the Royal Grove inside the Royal Hawaiian Center (2201 Kalākaua Ave, Honolulu, HI 96815). This replanted coconut grove marks Helumoa, where Kākuhihewa’s trees stood, where Kamehameha camped in 1795, and where Bernice Pauahi Bishop wrote the will that founded Kamehameha Schools.
Her statue is here, and the center runs free hula shows and cultural classes most weeks; the current schedule is on royalhawaiiancenter.com. Sit on the grass between the shopping bags and you are sitting in the royal compound.
Then follow the Waikīkī Historic Trail. Historian George Kanahele dreamed it up, and bronze markers shaped like six-foot (1.8 m) surfboards mark 23 sites from Kapiʻolani Park to the Hilton lagoon.
The map is a free download on the Waikīkī Historic Trail site. The markers for ʻĀpuakēhau Stream, Helumoa, the Kālia fishponds, and the Ala Wai Canal itself trace this exact story.
Save time for the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaiʻi at Fort DeRussy (2131 Kālia Rd, Honolulu, HI 96815), which sits on the old fishponds. It is free, open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and worth an hour.
The canal walk is the last stop. The Ala Wai Promenade runs the mauka bank under old banyans between Kalākaua and Ala Moana Boulevard. The makai sidewalk along Ala Wai Boulevard runs the whole two miles (3.2 km).
Late afternoon is the time to go, when the canoe clubs put their waʻa in the water and the light comes across the Koʻolau. Keiki teams train here after school, and the sound of paddles hitting the water is the most alive thing on the canal.
Street parking on Ala Wai Boulevard is metered and fills fast, so walk from your hotel or take TheBus.
Do not go in the water. Not to cool off, not for a photo, not on a dare! The state has posted that warning since 1991, and the 2006 spill is why kamaʻāina still take it seriously.
Paddling with a club is a different story: cover any cuts and rinse off after, the same rule locals follow at every stream mouth on the island. After heavy rain, stay off the whole canal.
Check the Department of Health’s brown water advisories before you swim near the harbor mouth at Ala Moana or the ʻEwa end of Waikīkī. That is exactly where the canal drains.
One more stop if you have the legs: Kapiʻolani Park, dedicated by King Kalākaua on June 11, 1877. Its lagoon once held Makee Island, where people rowed out to picnic. The Ala Wai fill buried it; the Honolulu Zoo entrance stands on it today.
Waikīkī was Oʻahu’s breadbasket for four centuries and a resort for one. The water is still here. It just runs in a straight line now, behind a wall, out of sight of the beach it used to feed.
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