| Hilton Hawaiian Village | |
|---|---|
| Location | Honolulu, Hawaii |
| Owner | Hilton Hotels |
| Rooms | 3,386 |
| Website | www.hilton.com |
The Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort and Spa, formerly the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel, has been a popular hotel in the Waikiki area of the City and County of Honolulu, Hawaii, United States since 1957. It is the largest hotel of the Hilton chain, with 3,386 rooms and with 7 towers. It is also the 14th largest hotel in the world.
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Located on the Hawaiian island of O'ahu, it was built on the former village of Kalia, which was the childhood home of Duke Kahanamoku. It consisted of a private estate with an owners' residence, tenant houses and a salt flat. The portion of the estate nearest the ocean beach was developed around 1900 as a small hotel named the Old Waikiki, then redeveloped in 1928 as the Niumalu Hotel.
The Village was conceived, constructed and first administered by Henry J. Kaiser, the industrialist who built the Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam and founded the Kaiser Permanente health system. Kaiser bought the Kalia estate of 16 acres (6.5 ha) and combined it to construct the Hawaiian Village, converting the flat to a lagoon.
Today, the Hawaiian Village Hotel sits on over 22 acres (8.9 ha) of beachfront property, near the Ala Moana Center. It features the largest swimming pool in Waikiki, over twenty-two restaurants, exotic wildlife, and botanical gardens, Duke's Lagoon and a branch of the Bishop Museum.
In building the Hawaiian Village Hotel, Kaiser developed the "village plan" for his resort. In the village plan, various sections of the development were designed in specific types of motifs indicative of the culture of the hotel's surroundings. The various villages in the present-day Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort and Spa surround centerpiece towers: Diamond Head Tower, Ali'i Tower, Tapa Tower, Rainbow Tower, Lagoon Tower, Kalia Tower and Grand Waikikian. The newest tower is the Grand Waikikian, which was opened to the public December 28, 2008.
Kaiser's village plan is now used in various layouts of hotels and resorts throughout the world.
The Village Hotel is home to a group of South African black-footed penguins that live in an outdoor habitat surrounded by greenery and a small pond filled with several types of turtles (box and soft-shelled). Other animals that live on the grounds include several types of ducks, lesser flamingos, sacred ibis, black-crowned night herons, koi fish, chameleons, macaws, and parakeets.
The Village was the site one of the earlier geodesic domes constructed in the United States.
Wanting an auditorium at the Honolulu village, Henry Kaiser acquired the license to produce geodesic domes following the design work of Buckminster Fuller. An aluminium-skinned dome with a 145 ft (44 m)-wide span was manufactured at the company's plant in Oakland, California and shipped to Hawaii. When Kaiser understood that the materials had arrived in Hawaii, he flew from San Francisco to follow the construction — only to discover the building was already complete, having been constructed in only 22 hours.