For a lot of people in Honolulu, the shuttered Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial serves as a crumbling monument to a decades-old community argument about whether it should be restored or demolished.
Filmmaker Jason Lau sees that now. But when he started directing his new TV documentary, “The Tank,” about the saltwater pool, the Natatorium was simply a place of childhood memories. It was where Lau learned to swim when he was 6, where his father took the family for a cooling dip, where he and his boyhood friends asked scary questions about eels in the murky water and who was going to jump off the high dive. (Not Lau.)
“I did not realize how controversial it was and how deeply people felt about restoring it or getting rid of it,” he said. “For me it was just something that was sitting there forever and that something really should be done.”
“The Tank,” which will debut at 7 p.m. today on KHNL, started out as a pitch from the Friends of the Natatorium, a community group that urges restoration. The group wanted a short YouTube video, but Lau, now 53 and a co-founder of the local film company TalkStory Productions, wanted to tell a larger story. He took on the project pro bono but insisted that it be a balanced story.
“We did it on the condition that we would have the freedom to tell the story of the Natatorium in a fair, balanced documentary,” he said. “I didn’t want to make a one-sided propaganda thing. I wanted to educate people and show them there are two sides to this, like any good controversy.”
Built in 1927 as a memorial to the Hawaii soldiers who served in World War I, the Natatorium was the site of many championship and record-setting swimming events. It was also a place where families hung out because Waikiki hotels in the 1930s and 1940s made their beaches off-limits to the public.
The pool is enormous. At 100 meters it’s twice as long as an Olympic-sized pool. It’s history is just as large. Hawaii swimming legend Duke Kahanamoku was the first to swim there when it opened. Hollywood celebrities, including Esther Williams, Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller, also swam its length.
But it suffered from years of neglect and disrepair, and was closed to the public in 1979.
The city’s current plans are to tear down much of the Natatorium — its Beaux Arts-style arches would remain — and turn the area into a beach.
Donna Ching, vice president of Friends of the Natatorium, said the documentary was needed as a way to record interviews before the aging population of Natatorium users passes into history.
“We don’t want to lose those stories,” said the 53-year-old Ching, whose grandfather would take her swimming there as a child. “We want to share what it is like behind the gate for people who are too young to have ever been there, and to convey to people the astounding amount of history that was made at that place.”
The documentary includes historic photographs, home movies shot at the pool but never before seen, and underwater footage shot in 2014 during a review by a marine contractor and a structural engineer. Ching went with the underwater crew and said she was overcome with the history of the Natatorium.
“All I could think of was all the famous people who swam there, including Duke Kahanamoku,” she said. “The original steps that go into the pool are there, and all I could think of was Duke Kahanamoku stuck his foot there.”
Despite months of research and interviews, Lau doesn’t have a position on the pool’s future. Full restoration would cost anywhere from $20 million to $70 million, “depending on who you talk to,” Lau said.
“I’m definitely on the fence on this,” he said. “I understand both sides. It’s a lot of money to restore it. But I realize it has historic value, and it’s not a clear black-and-white question.”
And that’s a wrap …
Mike Gordon is the Star-Advertiser’s film and television writer. Read his Outtakes Online blog at honolulupulse.com. Reach him at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
