50 Fun Facts About Honolulu

Honolulu sits on the southeast coast of which Hawaiian island?

Oahu. City and county are a single government covering the whole island, so the mayor of Honolulu is also in charge of the country towns on the far North Shore.

What does the name Honolulu mean in Hawaiian?

Sheltered harbour, from hono, a port, and lulu, calm. Captain Cook and other early explorers overlooked the anchorage behind its reef, and no foreign ship sailed in until 1794.

Which trade made Honolulu's port boom in the 1840s?

Whaling. Hundreds of whaleships a year put in at Hawaiian ports in the 1840s to rest their crews and restock, and for about 40 years supplying them was the mainstay of the islands' economy.

Kamehameha III moved the kingdom's capital to Honolulu from which town?

Lahaina. Trade and foreign shipping had been shifting to Honolulu for years, and in 1845 the king moved his government from the Maui town to follow them.

In 1935, which pilot became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to the US mainland?

Amelia Earhart. The crossing had a deadly record, with lives lost in a 1927 air race over the same water, yet her own flight to Oakland was mainly routine, with no breakdowns.

Kamehameha I conquered Honolulu's island in 1795 at which battle, where the defenders were driven over a cliff?

Nuuanu. The win left only Kauai and Niihau outside his rule, and they joined the kingdom by agreement in 1810 without a battle.

After the 1893 overthrow, who became Hawaii's president?

Sanford Dole. He ran the republic until the United States annexed the islands, then became the territory's first governor, and a younger cousin, James, founded the pineapple company that made the name famous.

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that pushed the US into World War II happened on which date?

December 7, 1941. The next day President Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy' before Congress, and he signed the declaration of war on Japan that same afternoon.

Which is the closest major city to Honolulu?

San Francisco. Even that nearest neighbour is more than 2,300 miles away over open sea, so Honolulu has to import most of its goods and pays well above mainland prices for fuel, power and food.

Honolulu's antipode is in Botswana, but most of the mainland US lies opposite which ocean?

The Indian Ocean. Only three scraps of the lower 48, in Colorado and Montana, sit opposite dry land, on remote French islands, so a tunnel from almost any mainland city would come up in open water.

Fires lit on purpose to fight which disease ran out of control and burned down Honolulu's Chinatown in 1900?

Bubonic plague. The Board of Health was burning buildings where victims had lived when the wind shifted and carried embers onto a church steeple, and most of the district went up with it.

Ala Moana Center is billed as the world's largest what?

Open-air shopping centre. It stands on a former swamp filled in with spoil from nearby dredging, and when it opened in 1959 it was the largest mall of any kind in the United States.

The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific sits inside which Honolulu landform?

Punchbowl Crater. Hawaiians knew it as a hill of sacrifice, where breakers of sacred law were put to death, and since 1949 it has held the graves of Americans killed in the Pacific wars.

Warm enough to be tropical, Honolulu is classed otherwise because it gets too little what?

Rain. The mountains behind the city catch the trade-wind showers first and leave Honolulu in a rain shadow, so it is classed as hot semi-arid, a label it shares with the edges of deserts.

Barack Obama, born in Honolulu in 1961, graduated in 1979 from which of the city's private schools?

Punahou School. He came back to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his grandparents and attend it on a scholarship, at a campus that missionaries had founded in 1841.

Which hurricane devastated Kauai in September 1992 and also damaged Honolulu's island?

Iniki. It crossed Kauai on the last day of the Jurassic Park location shoot there, and Steven Spielberg's cast and crew rode it out in their hotel.

At the 2010 census, which was the largest single Asian ethnic group in Honolulu?

Japanese. So many came to work the sugar plantations that by the early 1920s people of Japanese descent made up more than two in five of everyone living in Hawaii.

Which Honolulu museum holds the world's largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts?

Bishop Museum. A banker built it in 1889 in memory of his wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi, to house the royal heirlooms that had come down through her family.

Whose 1973 concert 'Aloha from Hawaii' was beamed live by satellite from a Honolulu arena?

Elvis Presley. Because nobody could sell tickets to a television audience, the arena seats went for donations to a cancer fund named after Kui Lee, a Hawaiian songwriter who had died at 34.

Heiress Doris Duke built which Honolulu estate, now a museum of Islamic art?

Shangri La. Duke began it after a honeymoon that took her through the Islamic world in the 1930s, and for nearly 60 years she filled its rooms with art from Iran, Syria, Morocco and India.

Which world-championship endurance event was first held in Honolulu?

Ironman triathlon. In 1978 a couple strung three existing island races, a rough-water swim, a round-the-island bike ride and the city marathon, into one day, and said whoever finished would be called the Iron Man.

Which NFL event was held in Honolulu almost every year from 1980 to 2016?

Pro Bowl. The all-star game had changed city every year for seven years, then settled at Aloha Stadium for 30 straight seasons and left only twice before its last Hawaiian game in 2016.

Honolulu teams won which World Series in 2018 and 2022?

Little League World Series. The 2018 side shut out South Korea 3-0 in the final, and the 2022 team led Curacao 13-3 when the game was stopped after four innings under the run rule.

Honolulu's main airport is named after which US senator?

Daniel K. Inouye. The Honolulu native lost his right arm leading an assault in Italy in 1945, won the Medal of Honor for it, and then sat in Congress for Hawaii from statehood until he died in 2012.

Honolulu's interstate highways carry which unusual letter prefix?

H, for Hawaii. The roads cross no state line, but they earned the Interstate name a year after statehood because they were built for defence, to link the island's scattered military bases.

In 2012 Honolulu topped a US traffic-congestion ranking, just ahead of which city?

Los Angeles. Honolulu drivers were wasting 58 hours a year in jams, enough to beat the usual capital of gridlock, and the city has since opened a rail line to take cars off those roads.

What is the name of Honolulu's rail transit line whose first segment opened in June 2023?

Skyline. Voters approved it by a narrow 53% to ease the city's traffic, and its trains run with no drivers on a track raised above the roads it was built to relieve.

Honolulu's public bus system, twice named America's Best Transit System, is called what?

TheBus. The city took the service over in 1971 under Mayor Frank Fasi, after strikes at the private bus company had twice left riders without a single bus for two months.

Which battleship, on whose deck Japan surrendered in 1945, is now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor?

USS Missouri. She is moored about 500 yards from the sunken Arizona and faces it, so that the ships on which America's war began and ended lie in the same water.

The University of Hawaii's main campus is in which Honolulu valley?

Manoa. A rainbow came out over the field as the university's footballers upset Oregon State in the last game of their 1923 season, and sportswriters began calling its teams the Rainbows.

Waikiki's Royal Hawaiian Hotel, opened in 1927, is famous for being painted which colour?

Pink. The rosy stucco won it the nickname 'Pink Palace of the Pacific', and after Pearl Harbor the military took over the whole hotel as a rest centre for men back from the fighting.

What does Waikiki mean in Hawaiian?

Spouting fresh water. The name is thought to recall the springs and streams that once ran down to the beach, where Hawaii's royalty kept a retreat and rode early longboards.

Why was the Ala Wai Canal dug in Waikiki in the 1920s?

To drain mosquito-breeding wetlands. The mud dredged from the canal was sold to raise the old rice paddies and duck ponds, and the hotel district stands on the land that made.

Sand for Waikiki is said to have been shipped in the 1920s and 1930s from which California town?

Manhattan Beach, California. Builders levelling its dunes are said to have sold the spare sand to Hawaiian developers, though most of what lies on Waikiki now was trucked in later from other island beaches.

Which author stayed at Waikiki's Sans Souci resort in 1893, helping put it on the tourist map?

Robert Louis Stevenson. The Treasure Island author came up from his home in Samoa, and his Greek-American host had only just taken over the beach house, called Sans Souci, French for 'carefree'.

Which TV police drama, first aired in 1968, used Honolulu's Iolani Palace as its detectives' headquarters?

Hawaii Five-O. Shots of the palace's exterior stood in for the unit's offices, and when the show ended in 1980 its Honolulu studio passed to Magnum, P.I., which filmed on the same stages.

After Hawaii's king visited Thomas Edison in New York, Iolani Palace was fitted in 1886 with which new technology?

Electric lights. The palace switched them on five years after the king watched Edison's demonstration, and several years before the White House itself was wired.

Which king built the current Iolani Palace, completed in 1882?

Kalakaua. He staged a lavish coronation there in 1883, nine years into his reign, and used it to bring the hula, long frowned on by the missionaries, back into public life.

Honolulu's Kawaiahao Church, known as Hawaii's Westminster Abbey, was built in the 1830s and 1840s from blocks of what?

Coral. Divers chiselled some 14,000 slabs, each weighing about half a ton, from a reef several metres under water and ferried them ashore by canoe.

Which Hawaiian queen was held prisoner in an upstairs room of Iolani Palace after a failed uprising in 1895?

Liliuokalani. Hawaii's last monarch was locked in a bedroom of her own former palace after royalists tried to restore her, and the quilt she stitched there is still on show in the room.

What is the Hawaiian name for Diamond Head?

Leahi. The name is thought to join lae, a brow or headland, and ahi, the tuna, because the ridge is said to look like the fish's back fin.

British sailors named Diamond Head after mistaking which mineral for diamonds?

Calcite crystals. The glitter in the sand was worthless, but the name stuck, and the crater's real value proved to be military: the Army built a fort inside it and a summit trail to direct its guns.

What did Hawaiians originally call the lagoon now known as Pearl Harbor?

Wai Momi, 'waters of pearl'. The shallow lagoon began its naval life in 1887, when the Hawaiian kingdom gave the United States the sole right to keep a coaling and repair station there.

Honolulu-born Olympic swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku is best remembered for popularising which sport beyond Hawaii?

Surfing. He worked board-riding displays into his swimming tours, and the one he gave at Sydney's Freshwater Beach caused a sensation that helped make surfing an Australian passion.

Duke Kahanamoku held which Honolulu office for more than two decades?

Sheriff. Voters returned the old Olympic champion again and again, and when he finally left the post, Hawaii paid him to stay on as its official greeter of famous visitors.

Which Honolulu landmark, opened on the waterfront in 1926, was Hawaii's tallest structure for four decades?

Aloha Tower. The lighthouse welcomed arriving liners much as the Statue of Liberty did in New York, until the war, when it was painted in camouflage and its light put out.

Honolulu became a US territorial capital after which president signed the 1898 resolution annexing Hawaii?

William McKinley. His predecessor, Grover Cleveland, had withdrawn an earlier annexation treaty, but McKinley pushed the islands' takeover through Congress in the middle of the Spanish-American War.

Which Australian film star was born in Honolulu in 1967 while her parents were studying in the United States?

Nicole Kidman. Her parents were on student visas and took her home to Sydney a few years later, but being born in Honolulu left her a citizen of both countries.

Which pop star, born Peter Hernandez in Honolulu in 1985, was on stage in Waikiki with his family's band at four?

Bruno Mars. He sang five nights a week with the Love Notes, his family's show band, and while still a small boy he had a cameo in the film Honeymoon in Vegas.

Which bay east of Waikiki, a volcanic crater flooded by the sea, is a nature preserve famous for snorkelling?

Hanauma Bay. So many swimmers came, at one time three million a year, that every visitor now has to watch a conservation film before going down to the reef.