[ A WALKING TOUR ]
South Street fire station
has a ghostly past
The newer fire station on Queen Street bustles with activity, while just around the corner, the fire station on South Street is abandoned, empty, lonesome. Or is it? Almost every firefighter who served there has a ghost story or two to tell about the place.
The ghosts, courtesy a nearby mass burial of smallpox victims, predate the station, which opened for business in 1929. It followed the plan of other Honolulu stations, notably Makiki's, which also is a boxlike, two-story structure of reinforced concrete with a stucco veneer and capped with a green-tile hipped roof with overhanging eaves and exposed rafters.
At the rear is the hose-hanging tower decorated with long, thin arched louvers and surmounted with a decorative window treatment and its own green-tile roof. The Kakaako station is unusual in that the big fire doors slide to the side rather than up. On the mauka side, a ladder-truck building was added a year later and connected to the main building by a one-story stucco wall and arched entry.
As a historic landmark, the Kakaako station is a valuable and tangible link to Hawaii's cultural and architectural past, the sort of structure that defines our unique sense of place. And Honolulu has quite a firefighting history:
Honolulu's fire department, the oldest organized west of the Rockies -- signed into being by Kamehameha III in 1850, which also makes it the only American fire department sponsored by royalty -- was headed almost immediately by Alexander Cartwright, later to be a Civil War hero and much later to be considered one of the creators of baseball.
King Kalakaua was an enthusiastic volunteer fireman and pitched in battling Honolulu blazes.
Honolulu firefighters were in the thick of the Pearl Harbor attack and still maintain a firetruck marred by Imperial Navy strafing.
You'll find out all this and way more when the Fire Department renovates the Kakaako station into a museum, part of their planned headquarters complex on the site. A groundbreaking and blessing for the project was held last September.
Kakaako Fire Station
Opened: 1929 Architect: probably Solomon F. Kenn Style: Spanish Mission Revival Address: 620 South St. National Register: 1980 #80001277 Hawaii Register: 1980
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The ghosts of a smallpox epidemic are said to reside at the shuttered Kakaako Fire Station set to become a museum.
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Quicktime VR Panorama
Click on pictures to view panaromas
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Every Sunday in the Star-Bulletin Travel section, rediscover the charms of old Hawaii through a tour created by the Honolulu Historic Trail Committee and Historic Hawai'i Foundation and supported by the city's Office of Economic Development. The yearlong project commemorates Honolulu's bicentennial.
See Holoholo Honolulu for past articles.
