Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
After 50 years in the old Kapuiwa building which King Kalakaua built in 1883, the State Health Department will move soon into a new home.
There’s not the ghost of a chance that the new building — Hale Kinau — will be occupied as long as the old by tenants who watch, guard and regulate Hawaii’s health.
William Pung, the State’s chief engineer, said the new building will be too small in 15 years, and he’s including in that estimate two floors which won’t be added to the structure for some years.
And that, Pung said, is probably understating fact.
A health department officer said the new building “would be too small now if all health services were housed where they belong — under one roof.”
Hawaii’s newest public building is a four-story-plus penthouse-restaurant affair — 52,354 square feet from top to bottom.
The $1.6 million glass-louver-laced structure on land bought for $318,896 is engineered to take two additional floors, and is oriented on its land at the corner of Beretania and Punchbowl Streets to gather in the cooling, northeast trade winds.
The building was designed years ago, without air-conditioning, and to add a system after the plans had been drawn and construction started would have cost about $200,000.
Throughout, the building uses movable partitions to balance unforeseen space needs and keep building costs down.
Everyone from Dr. Richard K.C. Lee, the director, in his new beige-carpeted office suite to the clerk who will wash her hands at one of the open basins bolted to the structural columns in large, public offices will find happy improvement in working conditions.
The old building was shut in and dreary. The new one is open and institutional. But, like a new shoe, it will take some breaking-in before it fits.
Not everyone among the 275 employes in Hale Kinau will be happy to find that hand cranks on louvered windows are out of reach unless you’re fairly tall (small stepladders are being considered).
