RUSS LYNCH / RLYNCH@STARBULLETIN.COM
Michelle Lam, owner of Michelle's, showed a necklace yesterday to John Queen, a visitor from Maryland, while Queen's wife, Bernice, looked on. Lam's kiosk is one of many jewelry stands in International Market Place.
Market Place vendors
sad that ‘family’
is breaking upA $100 million renovation that will
begin in 2005 at the Waikiki site is
expected to take more than two years
Vendors in the International Market Place in Waikiki are saddened but not surprised at the news that the place where they make their livelihood will close in the summer of 2005.
"I'm definitely sad," said Michelle Lam, who has run a jewelry cart called Michelle's in the center for more than eight years. "It's a very small community. Everybody is like family here."
She said landowner Queen Emma Foundation did not provide details of what is coming when it told a meeting of tenants yesterday that it will close the center a little less than two years from now and reopen it two to two-and-a-half years later after a rebuilding that could cost $100 million.
She said Foundation President Mark Hastert basically said that existing vendors will be out and the owners "want to open it up to new things."
The foundation said it would not comment until a news conference set for midmorning today.
Lam and others in the center said they recognize that the Market Place, the center of Hawaii tourist retailing since it opened in 1957, is physically run-down and needs change. The vendors said they have known for several years that the end of an era was coming.
But they said they will have to wait at least a couple of years, until the new center is ready to open in 2008, to find out if they can get back into the area.
Several vendors said they have young families and will have to find something else to do.
"We make a fair, decent living, where you can pay your bills and take care of your family," Lam said.
She and some other vendors said they were encouraged just a couple of years ago to build new cart kiosks and they did, at a capital investment of $15,000 to $50,000 per unit.
They will have to figure out how to get that back, they said.
What there is, they said, is recognition that the Market Place is old and has to be pulled down and rebuilt. Most of them said they believe it will continue to be a low-rise complex.
Those at the tenants' meeting at the Sheraton Waikiki yesterday morning said there was no complaining or protesting by vendors because they expected it.
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
The International Market Place opened in Waikiki in 1957.
There was nothing like the strident objections the vendors raised in the 1980s when there was a plan to demolish the Market Place and use the site for the Hawaii Convention Center. At the time, vendors protested at the Legislature and even cut themselves to write protest signs in their own blood.
Now, it is more of a sadness and a recognition of the inevitable.
"We feel sorry for the customers," said Noi Phomsouvanh, operator of the Richard's Jewelry stand and a five-year veteran of the Market Place.
She said she has been letting customers know that the Market Place, featured in the snapshots taken home by many of the 7 million tourists Hawaii sees each year, will close in a couple of years.
"We have lots of nice customers. They don't like the shopping centers. They like to bargain," she said, something that tourists have long been told they can do in the Market Place.
She and other vendors said they work hard and long hours in a competitive environment. Her stand is open year-round from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day.
"Business is OK. We can survive," she said, adding she will have to look for another job when that income disappears.
"The place is old," said lei stand operator Mina Tupou, and she recognizes it is time for a change.
"I was here in the early '60s," she said, learning hula and ending up as a professional dancer. Her auntie owned a big store in the Market Place but sold it in the tourist slump that followed the first Gulf War in 1991.
RUSS LYNCH / RLYNCH@STARBULLETIN.COM
Lei maker Mina Topou learned hula at the International Market Place in the 1960s and went on to be a professional dancer.
Tupou is one of half a dozen local craft people who are in a special Queen Emma cultural program in which they don't pay rent but have to instruct in local crafts and must make everything they sell.
"I can see it's good to have a new development," Tupou said, but she said it wistfully, remembering that many of Hawaii's most famous entertainers got their start at the Market Place, such as Don Ho, who worked for years at Duke's night club.
"At the same time I feel sorry for a lot of the people" whose lives will change, she said.
An airbrush artist who goes only by the name Panama said the news that the center will be redeveloped was "no big news" because it has been discussed before, but it was "pretty nice" of the Queen Emma Foundation to give about two years' advance notice of the closing.
"They've offered to help us as much as they can," said Panama, whose big business these days is temporary tattoos for kids who are too young to have real ones.
"If you look around, the place is falling apart," he said, and his four years at the Market Placer taught him that change must happen.
Tenants said Queen Emma has offered to provide a broker to help them find new locations and has offered its staff to help with federal Small Business Administration loans and whatever else they can do.
One of the major tenants in the center is Maui Divers, which has two Maui Divers jewelry stores there as well as a Pick-a-Pearl oyster opening stall.
"If you went back 25 to 30 years, lots of local people used to go there, but it's really deteriorated over the years," said Bob Taylor, Maui Divers president.
"We think the whole thing is exciting. We do very good business there and the International Market Place is a very good location," but it does need change, Taylor said.
"They're giving us lots of notice and offering a number of ways to help tenants," he said.
Ed Sultan, head of longtime Hawaii jeweler Sultan Co. which operates five Pearl Factory carts in the center, said the closing announcement wasn't a shock and, like Taylor, he said the long advance notice was nice.
"I wasn't surprised at all. They told us about it some four or five years ago and they gave us another two years' notice here. I think a redevelopment of the International Market Place is going to be good for Waikiki and that's good for Hawaii," Sultan said.
Retail consultant Stephany Sofos of SL Sofos Co. said she has heard it will be a low-rise shopping center and it is a fairly good size, since the plan includes the adjacent Waikiki Town Center, making it a little more than four acres.
"That's about two-thirds the Kahala Mall," she said. "As much as local people hate the International Market Place, the tourists like it."
And it is going to have a lot of competition from new centers rising in the neighborhood, Sofos said. "They're going to have to offer something unique that people want to go to," which is what the International Market Place has now, she said.
