Mother Waldron | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

By the 1880s, residential construction began with the filling of fishponds, marshes and mudflats starting with the area closest to downtown Honolulu; Kakaʻako flourished as a residential settlement where immigrant workers joined the Hawaiian community to form areas such as Squattersville, a shantytown which sprang up along the district’s makai border. (KSBE)

The Territory saw the opportunity to drain and fill the land that “was valueless” to be “available for the growth of the business district of the city” and attain “a valuation greatly in excess of the cost of the filling and draining.”

Back then, much of the makai lands from Honolulu to and including Waikīkī were characterized with lowland marshes, wetlands, coral reef flats and farming of fishponds along with some limited wetland kalo (taro) taro agriculture (and later rice.)

However, they were also characterized as, “stretched useless, unsightly, offensive swamps, perpetually breeding mosquitoes and always a menace to public health and welfare”.

This set into motion a number of ‘reclamation’ and ‘sanitation’ projects in Kakaʻako, Honolulu, Waikīkī, Lāhaina, Hilo and others. The first efforts were concentrated at Kakaʻako – it was then more generally referred to as “Kewalo.”

The Kewalo Reclamation District included the area bounded by South Street, King Street, Ward Avenue and Ala Moana Boulevard. They filled in the wetlands.

As the area grew and developed, so did the need for public facilities. In 1909, Governor Frear helped pass the “Act to Provide for the Establishment of the Public Library of Hawaii”. On May 15, 1909 the Honolulu Library and Reading Room and the Library of Hawaiʻi signed an agreement by which the former agreed to turn over all books, furnishings and remaining funds to the latter.

The building’s final location, though, had not been selected. Several possible sites were considered. Ultimately, Governor Frear made a lot available on the corner of King and Punchbowl streets.

The site he picked had been purchased in 1872 from Lunalilo and transferred to the Board of Education. In 1874, the government-supported Pohukaina School for Girls was built on the site. Just up the street was the Royal School for Boys.

In the late-1800s to early-1900s, the Pohukaina School served as a school for the illegitimate offspring of Hawaiian women and foreign men. (KSBE)

In order to accommodate the new Library of Hawaiʻi, after 36-years at King and Punchbowl, Pohukaina School was relocated to Kakaʻako on the reclaimed land.

Pohukaina School was moved to Kaka‘ako, within the city block bounded by Pohukaina Street, Keawe Street, Halekauwila Street, and Coral Street; the new school opened in 1913.

One of the teachers at the Pohukaina School was Margaret Waldron. Mrs. Waldron taught at Pohukaina for 18 years until her retirement in 1934. They called her Mother Waldron.

Mother Waldron was an orphan. She was raised by the Judd and Castle families and educated at Kawaiahaʻo Seminary. She was 1/8-Hawaiian and 7/8-Irish. She was part saint and part cop. (Dye)

Her philosophy was simple, “Never help anybody who isn’t willing to help someone else. When I help anyone, I make him promise to pay for it. But they don’t pay me directly; they pay me by promising to do just as much or more for the next person in need.” On her 50th-birthday, she was given a bar pin inscribed with the word “Mother.” (Dye)

She was also noted for her volunteer work in Kaka‘ako, and was “generally credited with being the individual who had most influence in transforming the so-called ‘Kakaako gangs’ into law abiding groups and wiping out the unsavory reputation which at one time clung to the district”. (Honolulu Star-Bulletin; May 8, 1936)

One time she wanted to clean the school playground of rocks and needed the help of some of the children. WWI was raging at the time, so she put a picture of the Kaiser in a vacant lot across the park. The kids threw rocks at the Kaiser and thus cleared the park (Dye)

Margaret Waldron died on May 8, 1936.

Here is a portrayal of Mother Waldron by Po‘ai Lincoln – part of the Hawaiian Mission Houses’ Cemetery Pupu Theater program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWPViX6nJZE

The following year, when a new 1.76-acre playground was constructed across Coral Street from Pohukaina School, the Honolulu Board of Supervisors authorized the park’s designation as “Mother Waldron Playground.” The playground, designed by Harry Sims Bent, was opened in September 20, 1937 on the site of the former County stables.

In 1933, Bent was chosen as the park architect for the City and County of Honolulu. Most playgrounds in the early twentieth century consisted of large areas of pavement used to get children off of the street and had no aesthetic value.

Bent’s design went beyond the modern level and into the realm of art deco, allowing for play, as well as contact with nature. His works at Ala Moana Park include the canal bridge, entrance portals, sports pavilion, banyan courtyard and the lawn bowling green.

The Mother Waldron Playground includes a historic one-story comfort station, two basketball courts, a volleyball court, an open field and benches along the historic boundary walls.

It features a painted brick perimeter wall, approximately 3-feet high, which zig-zags down Coral Street. Brick curbing and paving is used to further embellish the corner entries and delineates the sidewalk from the parking on the Coral Street side.

The Mother Waldron Playground was then the most modern facility in the Territory. The following year, Lewis Mumford, the noted author and social scientist, was invited by the Honolulu Park Board to study the county’s parks and playgrounds.

He noted the “spirit called forth in the Mother Waldron Playground.” Mumford defined that spirit exemplified by Mother Waldron Playground and other county parks.

Pohukaina School remained in operation in Kaka‘ako until 1980, by which time it had developed into a special education facility. The buildings were demolished, and in 1981, the Pohukaina School special education program was transferred to the campus of Kaimukī Intermediate School.

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“In recognition of the truth of Joseph Lee’s declaration, ‘A boy without a playground is father to the man without a job’, the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association is making a valiant effort … to secure a trained playground worker for Honolulu.” (The Friend, April 1912)

Initially private groups, rather than public agencies, undertook efforts to build playgrounds in American cities. Some of the first privately operated playgrounds open to the public were established in Boston in the 1880s, but most cities witnessed a burst of private initiative in the following decade.

A major objective of private playground organizers was to convince city officials that public recreation ought to be a municipal responsibility. As a result, by the opening decade of the twentieth century most large American cities had established playgrounds owned and operated by municipal governments.

Shifting from an initial desire to get children off the streets, the playground movement evolved in the first two decades of the twentieth century into a well-organized and articulate national crusade.

Its proponents saw the playground not only as a refuge from urban perils, but also as a place of social reform. They believed play had educational value, and emphasized that it should be organized and supervised by the director of the playground.

The social mission of playgrounds was emphasized in playground literature across the nation and in Honolulu. In Hawaiʻi, as elsewhere, the goal of playground activities not only included vigorous physical exercise and mental satisfaction, but also the ability to work as a team member and to develop ‘a disposition to strive for high ideals.’

It was felt that playgrounds developed such virtues as: health, physical efficiency, morality, initiative, self-confidence, imagination, obedience, a sense of justice, happiness and good citizenship. At the same time they discouraged such undesirable traits as: idleness, temptation, exclusiveness, social barriers, selfishness, gang spirit, rowdyism, unfairness and delinquency.

Established in 1895, the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association and one of Hawaiʻi’s first eleemosynary organizations, offered the first teacher training program and free kindergarten to all of Hawaiʻi’s children.

The teacher training program was eventually moved to what became the University of Hawaiʻi, and the kindergartens were taken over by the Territorial Department of Education, allowing the organization to focus on serving younger children.

Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association established the first public playground in the city in 1911, Beretania Playground, at the corner of Beretania and Smith streets in the heart of Chinatown. It was intended for boys and girls under ten, and for older girls accompanying the very young, and the “play garden” was open seven days a week from 9 am to 5 pm.

Initially, administration of municipal playgrounds was delegated to existing agencies such as park boards or school boards. However, many cities eventually established special playground commissions, which often led to jurisdictional problems.

Largely through the association’s efforts, a Recreation Commission was established within the city government in 1922, following the recommendations of Henry Stoddard Curtis, a former secretary of the nationwide Playground Association and the author of Education Through Play, who lectured in Hawaiʻi in 1920.

Julie Judd Swanzy, the president of the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association, was named as the Commission’s chair. The association turned its four playgrounds (Beretania, Kamāmalu, Atkinson and Aʻala) over to the city, and promptly opened five new municipal playgrounds: Kaimuki, Dole Park, Kalihi-Kai, Kauluwela and Kalihi-Waena.

By the 1930s and 1940s cities began to consolidate separate parks and playground agencies into a single “recreation” department.

The playground of the early twentieth century represented a significant departure from nineteenth century conceptions of a park. Rather than a carefully laid out landscape, planned as the antithesis of the cityscape, the twentieth century playground was usually of modest size and was conceived as a utilitarian space, sometimes embellished with landscaping effects or architectural detail, but frequently not.

The playground was a setting for supervised play and not contact with nature. The idea of the playground was to provide usable play space close to home in the densely populated sections of the city, not a green oasis set apart from the city.

During the 1930s, the City and County of Honolulu created a memorable set of parks and playgrounds. It was at this time that the concept of organized play in Hawaiʻi found its most architecturally significant expression.

Charles Lester McCoy, who was chairman of the Honolulu Park Board from 1931 to 1941, is remembered today as the “virtual founder of Honolulu’s modern park system.” His personal commitment to parks, combined with his administrative ability to get things done despite the scant resources of the time, profoundly shaped the growth of the city park system at this time.

One of McCoy’s most far-reaching decisions was to employ Harry Sims Bent as park architect in 1933. It is Bent’s work that gives the 1930s parks their ‘art deco’ architectural distinctiveness.

Bent started to work for the Honolulu Park Board on the Ala Moana Park project in 1933. His work at Ala Moana included the canal bridge, entrance portals, sports pavilion, the banyan courtyard and lawn bowling green.

In the smaller parks Bent was often responsible for the overall layout as well as the structures, including walls, comfort stations and pergolas.

During the 1930s he designed the following parks for the City and County of Honolulu: Mother Waldron Playground, Kawananakoa Playground, Lanakila Park comfort station, Kalihi-Waena Playground, Haleiwa Beach Park structures, the Ala Wai Clubhouse and the Park Service Center by Kapiolani Park. (Lots of information here from NPS and KCCA.)

The image shows children with “Breathing Space and Wholesome Play” (The Friend.) In addition, I have added other related images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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