The vintage red ‘Hotel Indonesia – Kempinski ‘ sign above Jakarta’s busiest traffic circle is nowadays nearly dwarfed by the gleaming skyscrapers all around it, but it’s a curious historical landmark. Known locally by its acronym ‘HI’ , the hotel is an eerie symbol of President Sukarno’s obsessive 1960s effort to create a ‘New Jakarta’ that would bring international respect to his nation and pride to his struggling people. Opened with great hoopla in 1962, Hotel Indonesia epitomized the era’s modernization drive, and as it declined over the years in a retro sort of way, it became the stuff of legends. The lobby displayed priceless evidence from that golden period, a photo of their very first guest, a visibly perspiring American named Allen Alwelt, who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and is seen arriving in a becak and wearing what the caption describes as “an ordinary shirt with no jacket, and brown cotton trousers”, a 1972 photo of a Bee Gees appearance at the hotel’s Nirwana Supper Club, a snapshot of a visit by Senator Robert Kennedy.
Australian writer Christopher Koch described it thus In his colorful novel-turned-Hollywood film, The Year of Living Dangerously, set in 1965:
” The fourteen-story Hotel Indonesia (always with a capital H) rode like a luxury ship in mid-ocean, being at this time the only one of its kind in the whole country. It stood in New Jakarta, and like Friendship Square, and Jalan Thamrin, the six-lane highway that carried the traffic here from the Old City, it had recently been ordered into being by President Sukarno, who considered an international hotel necessary to the nation’s prestige. Paid for by the Japanese, managed by the Americans, it had its own power supply (since Jakarta’s was fast failing), its own purified water (since Jakarta’s now carried infections), its own frigid air, which no other hotel could offer. Food was flown in from San Francisco and Sydney, or grown on the hotel’s own farm. With its restaurants, night-clubs, bars, swimming pool, and shops, it was a world complete. It was also majestically expensive, but heat or gastritis usually broke the resolve of those transients who tried the decaying colonial hotels of the Old City”.
Until very recently, decaying actually described Hotel Indonesia itself, reduced through neglect to a sad echo of its former glory, overtaken on all sides by far more luxurious international-chain hotels. No longer a home-away-from-home for glamorous foreign dignitaries and celebrities, the hotel mainly hosted tired Indonesian civil servants and political party hacks attending seminars in the capital. Five red-and-white ceramic Indonesian flags stood stubbornly over the lobby, greeting visitors at what mostly felt like a theme park to Indonesian nationalism. But history (and globalization) recently came full circle when German hotel group Kempinski revived the fast-deteriorating landmark as one of the city’s premiere luxury properties once again.
