Hawaii's famous Waikiki Beach sand came from this Calif. town |
Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Hawaii.
It wasn’t easy to get to Hawaii 100 years ago. The Pacific Ocean made for a daunting doormat, keeping most casual boat visitors well away. And with jet age air travel still largely in its infancy, the 2,400-mile trip from the mainland to Oahu was not one undertaken easily — unless, of course, you were a big barge full of sand.
As Southern California legend has it, a century ago, a chain of sandy freighters dared to make the cross-ocean journey from California to Hawaii, in hopes of solving two problems at once. In the early 1900s, Manhattan Beach, today a high-end coastal enclave in the greater Los Angeles area with multimillion-dollar homes right on the shore, was absolutely swimming in sand. Dunes towered high over the waves, their loose construction making development of the prized seashore difficult.
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Over in Hawaii, a similar redevelopment was underway in Honolulu’s Waikiki area, formerly the home of Hawaii royalty. The extensively modified coastal area was for most of its existence a place of wetlands, streams and vital springs, but the encroachment of hotels and other private property at the end of the 1890s led to thoughts about what could be. Over the decades, seawalls, piers and dredging efforts helped to overcome the ocean, but there was still the matter of all that soggy shoreline that needed more sand than could be gathered around the island.
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