Beside you runs the Ala Wai Canal, the man-made waterway that defines the inland boundary of Waikiki, and whose construction in 1928 permanently erased the landscape that had existed here for centuries. Before the canal, the land behind Waikiki Beach was a complex of wetlands: taro patches cultivated by Native Hawaiians for whom taro was a sacred food and the foundation of daily diet, rice paddies maintained by Chinese immigrant farmers who had leased the land after leaving plantation labor, and fishponds that had fed Hawaiian communities for generations. Territorial authorities decided in the 1920s that Waikiki's tourism potential was being hampered by the mosquito-breeding swamps behind the beach, and the Ala Wai Drainage Canal project was approved to drain the entire area.
The wetlands were drained, the taro and rice fields buried under fill, and the ground prepared for the hotels and apartments that quickly followed. The canal itself, 1.75 miles long and 50 feet wide, became a recreational waterway: outrigger canoe clubs lined its banks, and today you can watch paddlers training at almost any hour of the day. The Ala Wai is also an important ecological and stormwater system, though it has faced serious water quality challenges.
What you are looking at is a waterway built on top of an entire erased world.