Shabby," says Don Ho. "That's the word I'm looking for -- Waikiki was getting shabby."

Ho and I are cruising Kalakaua Avenue, the main drag, in his Lexus 450 SUV, and as we creep past cranes and jackhammers the singer is giving me a tour of what's being called the "Waikiki renaissance" -- the long-overdue makeover of Hawaii's busiest and most venerable tourist scene.

From Diamond Head to the Ala Wai Canal, it seems as if everybody is upgrading at once. Classic beach hotels are being renovated, new hotels are going up -- including a Trump Tower -- and blighted shopping zones are being rebuilt anew. Even the beach has a fresh load of white sand.

Home to half of all Hawaii's hotel rooms, Waikiki has been quietly ushering in improvements for seven years, but now the process has reached a frenetic climax. Waikiki at the moment is the busiest construction zone in Hawaii.

"We've needed this for a long, long time," says Ho as we edge past another crane at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center. "Waikiki was going to dry up and blow away if it didn't get some new energy."

A Waikiki institution, the 76-year-old Ho has seen all the changes. He's been singing in the nightclubs and strumming his ukulele on the beach here since long before Hawaii became a state. Point to any address and Ho can tell you what was there before, and often what was there before that. And he's as much a landmark as anything in town: After undergoing experimental stem-cell treatments in Thailand last year for heart disease, he's back to singing "Tiny Bubbles" two nights a week at the Waikiki Beachcomber Hotel.

More than a face-lift

As newer and more buzz-worthy resorts opened on the other islands, Waikiki found itself stuck in the 1970s, which is unlikely to go down in history as the golden age of architecture. The Japanese investors who owned many of the properties lost millions when the Japanese real estate bubble burst, and there was little money available for improvements.

"By the mid-'90s," said Rick Egged, president Waikiki Improvement Association, "Waikiki was getting tired -- kind of old, kind of schlocky. It was looking like a tourist trap."

But now money for improvements is pouring in. Public agencies chipped in $80 million for infrastructure upgrades, and new owners and developers are spending another $2 billion -- a third of the existing value of all the buildings in Waikiki put together.

Among the changes:

-- Lewers Street, until recently a dreary concrete canyon lined with tired shops and scruffy hotels, is being transformed into the Waikiki Beach Walk, a $535 million shopping, restaurant and hotel complex.

Buildings have been pushed back to make the street brighter and more inviting, and to make room for a grassy stage that will host free concerts and classes in hula, lei making and ukulele playing. Many of the new shops will be chains such as Quiksilver, Crazy Shirts and the inevitable ABC Store, but one tenant, Mana Hawaii, will combine five local businesses selling made-in-Hawaii ukuleles, kukui-nut leis and other items.

Two old hotel towers have morphed into the Embassy Suites Beach Walk, a new 21-story, 421-suite hotel that opened its first tower in December and the second earlier this month. The nearby Outrigger Regency on the Beachwalk, a 48-unit luxury "condotel" with gourmet kitchens and plasma TVs, opened its doors Feb. 16.

The various Ohana budget hotels in the neighborhood are being renovated and "repositioned" (i.e., taken up-market), and construction has begun on the 464-room Trump International Hotel & Tower, a luxury property scheduled to open in 2009. The hotel is using an ultra-quiet and unobtrusive new construction method that eliminates noisy pile drivers -- a little ironic, considering its namesake.