Sugar High
Hawaii's former agricultural region harvests its history.
By Sophia Schweitzer | Online Only | February 15, 2002
In the shadow of Mauna Kea, the agricultural region of North Kohala is luring tourists with its history.
Credit: Cathy Elliazar, CH Properties
Longtime residents of North Kohala on the Big Island of Hawaii make do by hunting pigs or taking service jobs at the resorts farther down the coast; they travel in dusty pickups, and beer is their libation of choice.
North Kohala, the 133-square-mile agricultural region of green hills and jungle valleys, is four islands away from the state's thriving capital, Honolulu, on Oahu. After the demise of their sugar plantation in the early 1970s, North Kohala residents struggled to keep schools, ethnic restaurants, hotels, theaters, and stores open. Those who could afford to fled to Honolulu, leaving once-proud gabled buildings to decay in the tropical heat and humidity.
In the past decade, though, affluent baby boomers with a taste for SUVs, lattes, and California wine have moved in from the U.S. mainland. These boomers are capitalizing on the region's wooden wealth, the everyday merchant buildings from the not-so-distant, prosperous plantation days. Several recently restored structures have made North Kohala something of a tourist destination, and newcomers and old-timers alike are pinning their hopes of reviving the economy on the region's past.
North Kohala has a seesaw history. Before contact with Western societies, more than 8,000 Hawaiians farmed its rainy, fertile slopes. King Kamehameha, head of a dynasty that ruled the islands for a century, was born here in 1758; today a nine-foot-tall, 123-year-old statue of him stands on a hill in the little town of Kapaau. The king's name means "one set apart," but Hawaiian isolation began to crumble in 1778 when Captain James Cook arrived, and with him Western concepts of trade. Inevitably, laws were passed (in 1850) that for the first time allowed private land ownership. The Hawaiian Islands became land parcels with prices few could afford. Hawaiians, unable to buy their own land, were forced to leave their homes.
In the late 1860s, a young missionary desperate to provide income for his dwindling flock established the Kohala Sugar Plantation, jolting the region's economy. (Because the United States agreed to become a duty-free market for sugar in 1875, plantations sprouted up all over Hawaii.) By the early 1900s, thanks to a masterpiece of hydro-engineering known as the Kohala Ditch, North Kohala flourished. Laborers from China, the Philippines, Japan, and Puerto Rico worked the fields and lived in camps of simple wood houses near the five sugar mills on the plantation. Dozens of commercial buildings sprang up in the region's two towns, Hawi and Kapaau.
But in the mid-1970s, the plantation in North Kohala was no longer able to compete with imported sugar and was shut down (as eventually were all but two in the state). This time, North Kohala's economic collapse seemed permanent. One by one, the region's stores, theaters, hotels, barber shops, and restaurants were abandoned. More than ever, young people moved away. "Buildings have looked decrepit from the earliest times I remember," says longtime resident Nani Svendsen. "They were torn down all the time. It was just how it was."
A few store owners, like Shiro Takata, managed to hold on. The son of a Japanese immigrant, Takata was raised in the grocery store that his father opened in 1929, the year he was born, in downtown Hawi. He started working for his dad in 1948, when 16 other grocery stores existed. By 1969, only eight remained.
In 1980, North Kohala counted only 3,300 residents, mostly plantation workers and their families. By then, they had been relocated from the ramshackle tin-roof houses of worker camps to small, cheap parcels ($1 for a third of an acre) along main roads.
Historic Imiola Church in Waimea
Credit: Cathy Elliazar
Soon Takata noted a second wave of newcomers—baby boomers—and took their arrival as a sign that the economy had rebounded. He moved his grocery store to a new, larger site between Hawi and Kapaau but wanted to preserve the old building where he'd lived and worked all his life. So Takata sold it to Joan Channon of Big Sur, Calif., who, after 16 months, turned it into a fine dining restaurant with art galleries. Today Channon's Bamboo Restaurant is an anchor of the region's new economy and the only place in North Kohala to get a full dinner.
"The preservation of North Kohala ultimately had to be based on economics," says Michael Gomes, a North Kohala native and vice president of Chalon International Hawaii, an adventure tourism company. Chalon acquired 20,000 acres of idle sugar land in 1988 and turned it into a cattle ranch. Today, the company leads kayak rides and excursions, on foot or in all-terrain vehicles, through the cow-populated landscape. "There's nothing out here but history," Gomes says.
Others are beginning to understand the potential of the area's old wooden buildings. On the windswept, desolate coastal road that emerges from a necklace of luxury resorts, a new low stone wall announces "Welcome to Historic Kohala." Ask around and you'll hear that the building behind the wall, painted cream with bright blue trim, was a general store called Fukada in the early 1900s; today it's a mortgage company.
The road quickly gives way to a busy street lined with North Kohala's new enterprises. A parking space can be hard to find. No one, it seems, strolls the narrow sidewalks without stopping to chat with friends. On the left, a former laundromat houses a cyber café. Across the street, a cheerful yellow building is the home of a real-estate agency, a clothing store that sells spaghetti-strap tops and silk gowns, and a frequently crowded coffee shop where health-conscious vegetarian tourists in their 20s are likely to share a table with cigarette-smoking retired plantation workers who talk of beef. All this takes place in the 1938 Toyama building, which used to house a company that sold machine parts.
Peek behind any of the spiffy buildings and you'll find corrugated tin roof houses, overgrown gardens, and lots of empty ocean-view land. Look farther, and you'll see the million-dollar mansions of newcomers.
Up in Kapaau, three miles farther north, two adjacent, contrasting structures show the difference restoration can make. The Sakamoto building, built in 1939, is in dire need of floor and roof repairs. Like any wooden building in the islands, it's a breeding ground for rot and termites. A pharmacy, a tourism agency, and a Hawaiian crafts shop are its only occupants. Next door, however, the two-story Old Nanbu Hotel glitters. Built in 1898 and closed in 1990 when the last remaining renter, a feed store, moved out, the hotel has been thriving since October 1999, with shops on the ground floor and office space above.
Nanbu Hotel in 1994
Credit: Neal Price
Not that restoration was easy. By the time former Colorado resident Neal Price, president of Innovative Tools, Inc., found the empty hotel, only 60 percent of it was salvageable. The Nanbu might very well have been condemned years earlier; sunk into its foundations, it was a hazard for pedestrians and motorists passing near its occasionally shattering windows and splintering wood. Margaret Hori, whose family owns the Nanbu and Holy's Bakery behind it, would have been happy to tear it down but lacked the energy or funds to do so.
Price signed a 30-year lease from the Horis, got the hotel listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and began a 14-month restoration with the help of a federal tax credit. Qualifying for the tax credit meant that new materials had to match the old—quite a challenge in a structure originally built of high-grade Douglas fir logged in the American Northwest when environmental issues were not a concern. "We put the facade on last," Price recalls. "We figured, once that's up, everyone will want to walk through."
And that's what happened. Suddenly the Nanbu was the town's real-estate hot spot. Potential lessors lined up to occupy office space in the former hotel rooms, and 20 retailers—some without any experience, others willing to move their existing stores, all eager to cash in on Nanbu's historic comeback—vied for space on the ground floor.
Older members of the community, called kupuna, told Price stories about the old hotel: drunken brawls in the bar, pool games, and horses tied up out front. With those stories in mind, Price didn't want businesses that catered to tourists and not Kohala residents. "Realistically," Price says, "there is only so much that full-time residents need. But the community can't sustain itself unless it draws visitors." So he chose a coffee-shop hangout, a jewelry store, a used bookstore, and an art gallery, which—the exception to his rule—draws tourists.
Like Takata's old grocery, the Nanbu's success illustrates what's possible when a struggling community finds a way to profit from its history. Since 1980, North Kohala's population has nearly doubled to 6,038 residents. But can successful renovations make sense of a past of royalty and plantations to new generations from different cultures? One thing is sure: In tiny North Kohala, where residents celebrate Japanese and Chinese festivals, Christian holidays, Philippine independence, and anniversaries to commemorate the Hawaiian legacy, the town's old wooden buildings provide an authentic local framework linked to a history of prosperity.
There is a sense of relief among North Kohala's locals that their buildings remain. But Kohala native Nani Svendsen speaks for many when she says, "It's hard to relate to the changes right away. It went so fast for us. We need to share our cultures and heritage to make this really work."
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