Kakaako Ala Moana Pump Station, Honolulu

During the Victorian Era, Honolulu was a very rapidly growing city. This was good for a lot of things, but sanitation wasn't one of them. The Kakaako Alo Moana Pump Station was the city's first sewerage pumping station, and was designed to address the problems caused by Honolulu's sudden growth spurt.

The Pump Station was built in 1900, of locally-quarried blue lava rock, and green tile. Oliver G. Tapenhagen, famous for designing the Moana Hotel, designed and built the Pump Station. It was replaced by a more modern facility in the mid-1950s, when it began to fall into disrepair, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Rather than tear down the historic building, several developers have proposed alternative uses for it. The Weiser Companies put forth an idea to build several other buildings around the old Pump Station, in a style that would blend in with it. Unfortunately, this never came to fruition. In 1997, a commercial fishing company expressed interest in turning it into a fishing museum, but this didn't come to pass, either. After that, others expressed interest in turning it into a restaurant, to no avail. In 2005, Louis Vuitton used the Pump Station as a party venue to celebrate the opening of his new store in Hawaii.