Under the Sun
Kaimuki keeps it real
despite renovationsIn the small Long Island town I visited recently, there are no fast-food restaurants, big-box stores, multiplex theaters or discount outlets. The town's economy hangs on seasonal tourists and the celebrities and other wealthy people who summer in the Hamptons, but the merchants know their year-round bread and butter comes from residents like themselves. People there also realize that one of the reasons visitors find the town attractive is that it retains a charm no amount of urban designing and jiggering can ever achieve. It's called authenticity.
Kaimuki town has the same kind of feel and scale. It has a few representatives of national and regional chains, like the McDonald's and Pizza Hut on lower Waialae Avenue, and franchises like the cookie shop and auto parts store, but Kaimuki is small, independent business country.
Restaurants and cafes, niche stores and little markets share the district with institutions of real life, like banks and the post office, schools and libraries. The combination provides businesses with a constant flow of customers from the surrounding neighborhoods. Specialty shops like Toys n' Joys, Heavy Metal and Bead It! probably attract a lot of people from other parts of Honolulu, but Kaimuki generally thrives on nearby residents.
I'm sure some of the area's retailers would welcome an influx of customers from across Oahu, and with shoppers more convenience-oriented nowadays, a big-box store might be seductive. But consider the businesses that banked their fates on Costco at Salt Lake. So dependent on the mega-warehouse retailer of all things necessary and unnecessary in life, the stores that basked in its bright lights have been cast into the economic shadows since Costco pulled the plug and moved to Iwilei.
An older commercial district, Kaimuki has survived several economic swats. Forty or so years ago the H-1 freeway cut through the neighborhood. Auto traffic that once fed through Waialae could bypass the town completely. When Kahala Mall was built, the climate control, groomed potted plants and bird-poop-free benches lured away many shoppers. Kaimuki -- once the home of such upscale island icons as McInerny's and Rattan Art Gallery and blue-collar emblems like Ben Franklin -- evolved. Businesses came and went as shop owners aged and retail desires changed.
The town most recently weathered a city renovation project. For months, merchants and residents endured machinery, noise, dust and loss of customers as cement sidewalks were replaced with brick, shrubs and trees were planted in newly landscaped pockets and some utility lines were buried underground.
My concern was that a spiffed-up Kaimuki would lose its authenticity, that it would be made to look like so many other planned and designed commercial centers in so many other planned and designed communities. Kaimuki had been the real thing, its dimensions fitted to its surroundings. Its businesses and their owners also matched. Their ambitions weren't to take their enterprises global. Instead, they sought a good living in a good neighborhood, to enhance their community through goods and good will.
I shouldn't have worried. Saturday night I joined hundreds of others at a block party celebrating the end of the renewal project. Part of Waialae Avenue was closed to traffic; people wandered through shops and sampled a varied menu at restaurants and food booths as musicians sent melodious sounds up the hill and down.
Some of the changes were disconcerting at first, but the town is too formidable for a bit of brick to make much of a dent in its character. It's kind of like seeing a favorite aunty who looks a little different when she's wearing a new hat, but when she smiles, you see that its really her. Like the smile, Kaimuki remains true to itself.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin for 25 years.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.