Yearly Archives: 2015

Photos: Courtesy of Rae Huo; Hawaiian Collection, Hamilton Library at UH Manoa UPDATE: 2015 Article Written By: Katrina Valcourt, HONOLULU Magazine Not much has happened with this site, though owner Jeremy Henderson says they’ve done some minor cleanup to improve the view, secured the buildings for safety reasons and gotten the station onto both state and national historic registers (Marconi Nomination). “We’d still like to preserve the historic buildings,” Henderson says. “Next, we’re planning a market feasibility study” to determine the options for adaptive reuse. Listed as Endangered in 2012 Article Written By: Kathryn Drury Wagner, HONOLULU Magazine What is it? On an oceanfront parcel of land in Kahuku, tucked between Turtle Bay’s golf course and shrimp farms, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Station gives us a rare glimpse into telecommunications history. The station’s name refers to Guglielmo Marconi, who invited and commercialized a way to transmit Morse signals wirelessly across great distances. Hawai’i was at the forefront in the use of this technology, and when the Kahuku station was built in 1914, it was the largest wireless telegraph station in the world in terms of capacity and power. By 1916, there was regular telegraphic communications between Hawai’i and Japan, a distance of 4,200 miles. The property was purchased by Marconi Point LLC in 2005, says owner Jeremy Henderson. It’s one of only two remaining telegraph stations in Hawai’i (the Koko Head station’s hotel building became Lunalilo’s Home in 1928), and one of only a handful in the country. Receiving stations in Marshall, Calif., and Belmar, N.J., also remain standing. What threatens it? Telegraph declined after Hawai’i was linked to the Mainland by undersea telephone cable in 1957 and, today, the buildings at Marconi station sit vacant and in disrepair. Until Henderson can come up with the right [...]

Photography: Courtesy of Friends of Ha'iku Stairs Article Written By: Katrina Valcourt, HONOLULU Magazine What is it? The controversial Stairway to Heaven in Ha‘ikū Valley, consisting of approximately 3,922 steps, was built as a means to reach antennae and transmission facilities on the mountain ridges, used to broadcast signals from the top-secret Ha‘ikū Radio Station commissioned during World War II. What started as a relay station to communicate with naval ships became an Omega navigation station in the 1960s, one of eight stations worldwide. Despite having the most advanced and complex antenna system of its time, the station was decommissioned in 1997 when GPS took over. What threatens it? The station sits in disrepair and has been heavily vandalized over the years. On the mauka side of the H-3, the stairs, which have been officially off limits for decades, suffer from wear-and-tear caused by hikers and were damaged by a storm in mid-February. The Board of Water Supply owns the stairs but does not want to manage them, and plans to tear them down, for safety reasons as well as to save money on security and prevent hikers from trespassing through the neighborhood. Mahealani Cypher of the Ko‘olau Foundation says the area could be used for cultural and educational purposes, and tearing down the stairs would cause damage to the native ecosystem. What can be done? Though BWS is looking into what it would cost to remove the stairs, it would prefer to have another agency take control of them. “We’ve approached a number of government agencies and, so far, everyone’s turned us down,” says Ernest Lau, manager and chief engineer at BWS, which remains open to discussions. Cypher says the Ko‘olau Foundation, along with others, including the Friends of Ha‘ikū Stairs, wants to transform the Omega station into a cultural museum. The landowner, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, has had some preliminary discussions [...]