Aloha|Downtown Honolulu — Two December Days on the Capital District Blocks

On 18 and 19 December 2013, the production took over streets in downtown Honolulu with Bradley Cooper working through the middle of the day. It is the one dated, publicly documented street shoot of the whole film, and it happened in the Hawaiʻi Capital Historic District — the twenty-odd blocks holding ʻIolani Palace, Aliʻiōlani Hale with King Kamehameha's gilded statue out front, Kawaiahaʻo Church cut from coral slabs, and the 1920s office buildings that fill the gaps between them.

The district is unusual among American downtowns. It was the seat of a sovereign kingdom before it was anything else, and the architecture argues about that on every corner: a Renaissance-revival palace with electric light installed before the White House had it, facing a state capitol whose columns are meant to read as palm trees and whose reflecting pool is meant to read as the Pacific.

Walk it on a weekday around noon, when the courthouse crowd is out and the banyans on King Street throw enough shade to sit under. Aloha is a film about a man who keeps mistaking Hawaiʻi for a posting. These blocks are the counterargument.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.