One of the biggest concerns facing Walter F. Dillingham and his son, Lowell, developers of Ala Moana Center, was how to deal with parking.
Their solution for the shopping center, which opened its first phase on Aug. 13, 1959, was 5,000 parking stalls and an elaborate system of signs and exits to guide shoppers.
Getting in and out of the huge mall was pronounced a success — and this was before it installed traffic lights the next month.
But Honolulu residents were so excited about the mall, a traffic jam might have seemed trivial. Ala Moana was big news in the 1950s, something Hawai'i had never seen before.
The $28 million mall was built by a Dillingham subsidiary on 50 acres of swampland. The Dillinghams reclaimed the land with coral dredged from a reef off Ala Moana Park. The first phase was 680,000 square feet. A second phase, completed in 1966, brought that to 1.35 million square feet.
The mall was viewed as a business threat to Honolulu merchants, who until then considered downtown the retail capital. But with more drivers on O'ahu roads, Ala Moana offered something the downtown merchants could not: abundant free parking.
Opening day was a mob scene, with 10,000 people arriving early for music and a pageant. The Rev. Samuel Keala, pastor of Kaumakapili Church, declared: "The people are now free to buy. And if you are short on cash, I believe you can charge."
And buy they did. Only 10 of the mall's planned 80 stores were open, but they were jammed all day.
More than 1,000 people rode the escalators from the street level to the mall in the first 10 minutes. Items flew off shelves at Sears, Longs Drugs and the Slipper House, which closed early because it ran out of merchandise.
The only other crisis was at Foodland, where customers stood five and six deep in checkout lines. It turned out that some of their patrons had parked a quarter-mile away, and it was taking the bag boys 10 to 15 minutes to carry their groceries.
