Post #441811 by tikitonga on Sun, Mar 22, 2009 6:38 PM

From today's Marin Independent Journal:

Barry Tompkins: Raise a glass to toast Fairmont Hotel's 'high tack' landmark

Barry Tompkins
Posted: 03/21/2009 07:09:06 PM PDT

And so it seems we are about to say goodbye to another old friend. It's another of those little flashbacks that you wish would just hang around despite having lost their vitality. Another of those things that make our little corner of the world something other than a generic community that could be in Boise or Dallas, or God forbid - Los Angeles.
The Tonga Room may soon finish second to a high-rise condominium planned for the Fairmont Tower. Ouch, man!

I can still form a mental picture of a scene that was as much a part of my childhood as Mel's Drive-In and Playland at the Beach. An orchid behind her ear, plucked from its place floating on top of some sort of sugary pink liquid in a coconut shell and sitting on a bed of dry ice creating a smoky ambiance through which the leer on the other side of the table was barely visible. A platter of puu-puus, a couple of spins on the dance floor and the promise of a night of romance - broken only by the cold reality of a handshake, or at best a peck on the cheek at the front door. That was livin'.

That was the Tonga Room.

I don't think there lives a person who grew up in the '50s in San Francisco who didn't spend at least a portion of his or her junior or senior prom at the Tonga Room. Sitting poolside there was that decade's version of getting through the velvet ropes and into the VIP room at the city's current hot spots. The Tonga Room was "camp" when there was no such meaning to the word. Long before high tech, the Tonga Room

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was "high tack."
It began its life way back in 1929 when it was the Fairmont Hotel's indoor swimming pool - dubbed the Terrace Plunge. In fact, no less a star than Helen Hayes was the first to dive into the pool and provide a non-bubbly christening. But by 1945, after falling into disuse as a recreational facility, the idea of using the pool as a centerpiece for a bar and restaurant and creating a South Seas atmosphere around it seemed - well, downright trendy.

All it took was some palm leaves, a boatload of pineapple juice, some coconut shells, and thousands of little paper umbrellas and - voila - you've got your very own tiki bar. The obvious marketing target was soldiers and sailors just back from the Pacific war.

Not that it was an original idea, mind you. There was a tony spot in L.A. at the time called Don the Beachcomber, and right here in the Bay Area, a guy named Vic Bergeron had turned a little gin mill in Emeryville named Hinky Dink's into a place called Trader Vic's which attracted the San Francisco "swells" sipping mai tais and popping Rangoon Crab Puffs as though they knew - or cared - where Rangoon really was.

But, the Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar saw Trader Vic's and raised it a floating band and a thunder and lightning storm. The Terrace Plunge was now home to a raft on which four guys in Hawaiian shirts strummed ukuleles and serenaded before leaving for their day gig as a mariachi band, and a dance floor that literally was taken from the deck of the last four-masted lumber schooner to ply its trade between San Francisco and the South Pacific. The Tonga Room was the self proclaimed "Grand Kahuna" of tiki bars.

Between the romantic ambiance of the Tonga Room, the parrot- and macaw-filled Papagayo Room just across the hall, and the Venetian Room upstairs (Ella Fitzgerald performed the night of my junior prom), one night at the Fairmont gave you the Tropics, Disneyland, and Carnegie Hall. Oh - and a kiss on the cheek. (Let it be noted that in the ensuing years of the sexual revolution I did considerably better with a beer and a burger at Perry's)

I haven't been to the Tonga Room in about as long as I can remember, but a friend from out of town was taken there recently and said, "It was so cool - so San Francisco."

Hokey? Yes.

Corny? Indeed.

But "So San Francisco?"

Absolutely.