Post #423037 by quickiki on Wed, Dec 10, 2008 9:38 AM

Sven, with all due respect, I'm not trying to bury the Tonga Room, but point out that if we are going to save the place as a "temple of Tiki", I just don't see how you can convince enough people the relevancy of the place considering how badly the original vision has been mangled by poor management and marketing. Let's face it, the room is essentially a basement that was converted into a bar in a famous San Francisco hotel. It isn't like a free-standing building that has architectural merit on its own. It's a part of a hotel, period. Getting historical preservation status for a room is going to be a very hard sell as opposed to a building.

As for labeling people's concerns about the lack of quality in the food, drink and atmosphere in the Tonga Room as "bourgeois" is I think misguided and insulting. This is supposed to be a forum for the open discussion of Tiki, good or bad. I would venture to guess that most of the people in this forum don't consider themselves "Tiki urban archaeologists", but view their interest in the subject as a hobby. Your books may have single-handedly opened the eyes of many people to the cultural phenomenon of Tiki and gain an appreciation for the subject, but the bottom line is that probably 99% of the people that visit the Tonga Room are tourists or curious visitors, and if THEY have a bad experience, it doesn't really matter what the tiki community thinks. Bars in hotels are market driven and if they can't make money, they'll go. Corporations aren't known for their sentimentality.