Ahead of you rises the Hawaii Convention Center, a landmark of Honolulu's modern identity as one of the world's premier conference and convention destinations. When Hawaii achieved statehood on August 21, 1959, it unlocked an era of dramatic economic and physical transformation. The post-statehood decades saw the systematic development of the Ala Moana corridor as the commercial and convention heart of Honolulu.
The Ala Moana Center, which opened in 1959 as the world's largest open-air shopping mall, anchored this development and became a gathering place for residents and tourists alike. The Convention Center itself opened in 1998, designed by Wimberly Allison Tong and Goo with a distinctive wave-form roofline and extensive use of native Hawaiian motifs throughout its public spaces. Today, Honolulu's economy depends on the interplay of military spending, tourism, and the meetings and conventions industry in ways that would have been nearly unimaginable to the sugar planters who dominated the islands' economy at the turn of the twentieth century.
The shift from an agricultural plantation economy to a service and tourism economy fundamentally remade who lived here, how they worked, and what they earned — transformations as profound as any that came before.