Post #565566 by aquarj on Thu, Nov 18, 2010 12:00 AM

Alright DC, here comes another installment!

First off, interesting comments everyone about the S&P, and thanks Sabu for the great information in those pics. Very interesting about Clif and Lou Sawyer. I wonder if that 1959 date means that The Lanai was mostly tiki'd up later in the 50s. If it was tiki early in the decade, that would definitely make it one of the earliest to go tiki as opposed to just tropical / polynesian. Most evidence suggests that the weird logo tiki on the doors, etc. came early in the restaurant's history, but it's hard to know if that was all the way from the beginning in 1950.

Also, that is INDEED a very strange looking Barney West tiki with the ball shaped head topped with a headdress. And I wonder if that moai is the same one that was out front under the Lanai neon sign. Fun to see those pics, even from that source, with the owner Emerson Murfee.

So, I'm going to post some stuff about Lanai Liquors. DC, you beat me to it with that scan from the brochure, but I was going to do higher-res, so I'll go ahead and show it anyway. From the Villa Square brochure... :down:

This image originally had me confused, because the more recent Lanai Liquors looked nothing like this. But then I read the caption, which says "...between the Villa Chartier and The Lanai..." This is NOT where it was later when the Barney West tiki lived out front. That later location up until 2004 was right on 41st Ave, as opposed to being inside the Villa Square. So at some point it moved, perhaps around the time that The Lanai became a Walgreens in the late 80s.

Going back to the images on the brochure, here's a closeup again from the panel dedicated to The Lanai restaurant. :down:

That's actually the Lanai Liquors there to the right of the restaurant entrance here. So, someone staying at the Villa Hotel could drink and dine at The Lanai, and stop in for some booze on the way back to their room! Great concept! Looking at the images, in fact, you can partially see a neon sign on top, just as you can in the circular image above. Hard to tell, but I think that same neon sign moved WITH the Lanai Liquors when it relocated to 41st Ave.

Just to get oriented on how things were, I marked up this partial rendering of the Villa Square that appears in the brochure. Unfortunately they EXCLUDED the Lanai Liquors and The Lanai from this rendering, but The Lanai was off to the left... :down:

Here's an old photo from the Villa Hotel. :down:

If you want to orient this with the rendering above it, this would be just over the pool area, looking in a straight line right-to-left in the rendering. At the far end of the building on the right, you can just make out the rock wall Villa Hotel sign that I pointed to in the rendering. I was surprised that you can't see ANY evidence of The Lanai, Lanai Liquors, or even Villa Chartier in this image. They must all be off to the left out of view, because you would almost certainly see those tall tiki torches on The Lanai turrets. BTW, that hillside in the background is all houses now, and also the Bel-Mateo bowl would be almost directly ahead and to the right.

Now a little more modern history with Lanai Liquors, including a little personal history. Unlike the lucky folks who were from right around this area and went to The Lanai, I never did, and first moved nearby in 2000 after the restaurant was long gone. What a great thing to find a local liquor store with an old tiki out front! In that way, Lanai Liquors was actually my introduction to The Lanai. The Book of Tiki came out later the same year in 2000, and it includes a photo of the tiki that lived out front of Lanai Liquors. Wow! Now there was much more info, including even the name of the carver Barney West and the history of this local spot! (BTW, note in the earlier photos above, there is no evidence of a big tiki out front, so I wonder if that came from the restaurant (inside? outside?) when it closed and the liquor store moved.) Back before the liquor shop was in peril, it was actually a great source for old spirits that were no longer distributed. I still have a bottle of Lemon Hart Jamaican gold rum from there, which was already long since gone from most shelves at the time I got it.

In 2002, the owner of the liquor store decided to sell the big Barney West tiki because his business was in trouble. I lucked out and managed to get it. This old thread is a time capsule of that moment. When I purchased it, I took some photos the day and night before we would be moving it, to document how it was "in situ". These appear on a little moving slideshow we made (linked on my Lanai website), but here are some of those images...

View from 41st Ave. The big box on the right is the Walgreens that replaced the Lanai. :down:

One of the shots of the moving crew. :down:

Life goes on for the tiki. In 2006 I got him tented to kill off some nasty termites with an appetite for vintage pedigreed tikis. :down:

Closeup of the tiki, 2010. Made to "last a lifetime" per the carver himself! :down:

In 2004, the Lanai Liquors officially closed and became Philip's Liquors. As detailed in this thread, the great neon sign for the liquor store, which had been the sibling to a similar sign for the restaurant, disappeared. Fortunately, we learned its fate later. Unlike The Lanai's neon sign, which was simply destroyed and trashed, a local collector purchased the Lanai Liquors sign just ahead of the wrecking ball, and had it moved to his warehouse area with plans to restore it. We learned this by catching a chance glimpse of it on a back road in an industrial area.

Here's where we spotted it. :down:

That's about all I know on the Lanai Liquors. Another sad story, but thankfully the sign and the tiki were preserved. Wish I had more info on the liquor shop of yore back in the glory days of The Lanai! Here's a pic of the same spot, just a couple days ago...

-Randy