The drive circles the Waiakea Peninsula, near Hilo International Airport, and boasts the largest hotels on the eastern side of the Big Island.

In 1991 Polly Mooney replanted a tree lost to a tsunami honoring Civitan International leader Courtney Shropshire.

[9][10] The Banyan Drive Redevelopment Agency has proposed new parks, a new cruise ship port, new commercial activity, and a new hotel.

Movie stars (and directors) include Cecil B. DeMille and his wife Constance, Mary Boland, William Gargan, Edna Best, Herbert Marshall, and Leo Carrillo.

Adventurers who planted trees include pilots Amelia Earhart, Knefler McGinnis and Arctic and Antarctic explorer, Lincoln Ellsworth.

Grant, and Dr. John Sonnenberg, Pacific area president, Roman Catholic Bishop Stephen Alencastre, Monshu of the Hongwanji Buddhists Kosho Ohtani, Methodist leader Bishop Gerald Kennedy who planted a tree along the drive but it was not a banyan tree, Japanese Christian reformer Toyohiko Kagawa, YMCA Training School President Dr. L. L. Doggett, and Dr. Daniel A. Poling, once pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church.

Residents of the Territory and later State of Hawai'i include Virginio A. Carvalho, Otto Rose, vulcanologist Dr. Thomas Jaggar, Hawaiian Princess Abigail Kawānanakoa, James McCandless, Dr. Grover Batten, David McHattie Forbes, Benjamin Bond (son of Hawaiian Missionary Elias Bond), hotelier William Kimi, and hotelier George Lycurgus.

Other people honored by banyan tree planting include musician Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, radio celebrity Arthur Godfrey, First Lady Pat Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, Eastern Star's William A. Duvall, Sr., American Legion's Ada Mucklestone and Ray Murphy, author Lewis Browne, Civitan's Courtney Shropshire and Polly Mooney Forestier, Philippine labor and cult leader Hilario Moncado, Boy Scout Executive James West, Cleveland College sociologist Henry Busch, authors Vicki Baum and Fannie Hurst, China's Premier Sun Fo, author and illustrator Hendrik Willem van Loon, Professor of Chinese culture P. C. Chang and cruise director of the RMS Franconia, Ross Hunt Skinner.