Walter Chamberlain Peacock, a wealthy Honolulu landowner, incorporated the Moana Hotel Company in 1896 with a vision of transforming Waikiki from a stretch of bungalows and beach houses into a proper resort destination. Architect Oliver G. Traphagen designed the building in European style, and the Lucas Brothers contractors completed it for $150,000. When the Moana opened on March 11, 1901, it was the first hotel in Waikiki. Its 75 rooms featured luxuries unusual for the era -- telephones, private bathrooms, a billiard room, a saloon, and the first electric-powered elevator in the Hawaiian Islands, which still operates today. The inaugural guests were a group of Shriners, who paid $1.50 per night. In Hawaiian, moana means "open sea," and the hotel's wide lanais on the ocean side framed views of surf and Diamond Head that would define Waikiki's image for the next century.

The Moana attracted remarkable guests from the start. In 1920, the Prince of Wales -- the future King Edward VIII -- reportedly fell in love with the hotel's private pier, diving repeatedly into the ocean. Agatha Christie and her husband stayed in August 1922 while traveling the world for the British Empire Exhibition. From 1935 to 1975, the courtyard hosted Hawaii Calls, a live radio broadcast that carried Hawaiian music to mainland listeners. Legend has it that audiences mistook the hiss of the radio signal for ocean waves, so the host sent a sound engineer to the waterfront to record the real thing, and the splash of surf became a staple of every episode. Behind the glamour, ownership changed hands with the tides of commerce. Peacock sold in 1905 to Alexander Young. The Matson Navigation Company and Castle & Cooke took control in 1925, built the Royal Hawaiian Hotel next door, and then watched tourism collapse in the Great Depression. The Territorial Hotel Company declared bankruptcy in September 1933.

Two floors were added in 1918, with Italian Renaissance-styled concrete wings creating the H-shape visible today. In 1925, wood-frame bungalows opened across Kalakaua Avenue on the former estate of Princess Ka'iulani. The postwar decades brought more construction: the SurfRider Hotel in 1952, the Princess Kaiulani Hotel in 1955 on the razed bungalow site. Matson sold all its Waikiki properties to Sheraton in 1959. Sheraton then sold the Moana and SurfRider to Japanese industrialist Kenji Osano and his Kyo-Ya Company in December 1963 for $10.7 million, though Sheraton continued managing them. In 1969, Kyo-Ya erected a modern tower on the Moana's northwest side. Through the Art Deco updates of the 1930s and the Bauhaus alterations of the 1950s, the original structure had been incrementally disguised. By the 1980s, it took an act of imagination to see the 1901 building beneath its accumulated renovations.

In 1989, a $50 million restoration stripped away decades of modifications and returned the Moana to its 1901 appearance, merging it with the adjacent hotel buildings into the Sheraton Moana Surfrider. The project earned the President's Historic Preservation Award and the National Preservation Honor Award. In 2007, the brand changed from Sheraton to Westin. But the most enduring presence in the courtyard is not the architecture -- it is the Indian banyan tree planted in 1904 by Jared Smith, then director of the Department of Agriculture Experiment Station. When planted, the tree stood about seven feet tall and was roughly seven years old. Today it rises 75 feet and its canopy stretches 150 feet across the courtyard, its aerial roots dropping like curtains around diners and wedding parties. In 1979, it became one of the first trees listed on Hawaii's Rare and Exceptional Tree List. The Moana has changed names, owners, and architectural styles six times over. The banyan just grows.