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Tiki Central / General Tiki / Urban Archeology

Post #10439 by Sabu The Coconut Boy on Tue, Oct 8, 2002 3:30 PM

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The Hanakiki is a little hard to find, but it’s really just around the corner from the Islander complex. It’s at the end of a short alley off of Memory Lane and easy to miss. I’ve been exploring and photographing them both for a few years now. I visit them whenever I visit Hilo Hattie’s at The Block in Orange - they’re just a mile away.

Stepping into the Hanakiki is like stepping completely out of California and into the pages of an old Southern novel, or an ancient abandoned plantation somewhere in Louisiana. It’s a completely walled-in community of small bungalow-apartments. The trees have grown so huge over the years that they completely block out any sunlight and undergrowth is thick and un-pruned. Giant flies buzz in the pools of filtered sunlight that make it through to the meanering pathways, and spiderwebs cover the eaves of the houses and the upper branches of the vast trees. Dead leaves are piled on roofs and the eaves sag ominously. It’s so quiet that you can almost hear the buildings creaking and the termites slowly devouring the bungalows, gradually returning the whole place into a virgin jungle again. You can see repairs that were begun years ago and never completed.

Bigbro, you are right, in that the only tiki remaining is the pole for the A-frame pool house. I’ve searched diligently through the ivy for others, but with no luck. The pole itself is interesting. It is a metal pole, and the hollow palm-trunk tikis were slid over it in sections to sheath it. The thin skin of these tikis have caused them to rot from the inside out over the years, and they are beginning to fall apart, but that just adds to the overall ancient feel of this place.

If I didn’t own a house, I would love to live there, though. It’s quiet and dark and completely secluded. A great refuge from the bustling city outside. The thatched back-wall of the pool-house, which has been painted white, would make a great screen for some poolside showings of The Hawaiian Eye, in my opinion. Based on some of the lovely bikini-clad wahines I’ve seen sunning themselves by the pool on a summer afternoon, I think the Hanakiki may be inhabited by a younger crowd, but I don’t really know.

I hope Baxdog’s, Al’s & Shely’s excitement at finding the Hanakiki and the Islander was as great as my own. I think that when we stumble across these great, hidden relics, we discover that we’re all urban archeologists under the skin.

Sabu

[ Edited by: Sabu The Coconut Boy on 2002-10-08 15:41 ]