Aloha|Hawaii Theatre — The Pride of the Pacific, Still Lit

Bethel Street runs narrow and shaded here, and then the marquee opens it up. The Hawaii Theatre has stood at 1130 Bethel since 1922, a Beaux-Arts pile with a mosaic of Diamond Head over the proscenium and the motto "The Pride of the Pacific" earned twice — once when it opened for vaudeville and silent pictures, and again in 1996 when a fifteen-year restoration brought it back from a decade of dark windows and water damage.

Cameron Crowe put it on screen. Honolulu Magazine, reviewing the trailer for Aloha in 2015, spotted the theatre in the cut and greeted it by name, the way locals do when a familiar building turns up in a studio picture. Crowe shot almost the entire film on Oʻahu in late 2013, and the Chinatown blocks around Bethel and Nuʻuanu carried a good share of the street work.

Stand across the road in the afternoon. The sign is unlit then, plain white letters on a plain white board, and the building looks like what it is: a working theatre in a neighborhood that never turned itself into a film set. Come back after dark and the bulbs go on one bank at a time.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.