Before any theme had a name: grand hotels planted palm courts, and the American appetite for an elsewhere-room was already old.
Steamship-and-postcard years — the South Seas as a magazine daydream, served in tea rooms and fair pavilions.
Hawaii arrives as music first: the hapa-haole craze puts ukuleles in every parlor and plants the sound the rooms would later borrow.
Prohibition dries the country and the tropical ballroom blooms anyway — palm-hung supper clubs selling escape without the rum.
Repeal, December 1933 — and within months Don’s Beachcomber is pouring on McCadden Place, first documented by a 1934 vice-squad raid. The tiki bar is invented whole, Trader Vic’s answers, and the arms race begins.
A generation ships out to the Pacific and comes home homesick for islands they only half saw. The escapism business becomes an industry.
The Golden Age at full sail: Polynesian palaces rise in every American city — supper clubs, floor shows, mystery drinks, three-story moai.
High water. Statehood pours gasoline on the fire; the early sixties put more tiki temples on this chart than any time before or since.
The Long Ebb begins. Tastes turn; the great rooms start to close, burn, or get remodeled into oblivion.
The ebb at full pull — fern bars and redevelopment take the palaces one by one, and almost nothing new rises to replace them.
The low-water mark. A handful of survivors keep the torches lit while the first collectors start writing it all down.
The tide stirs — the revival’s first new rooms open, and the community begins charting what was lost.
The Revival proper: the craft-cocktail generation rediscovers the canon, and new temples rise on the old bones.
The tide still coming in — hard losses in the pandemic years, matched by new rooms; the revival outlives its own novelty.