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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Saturday, June 19, 2004

Kapahulu's past can shape its future

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Joan Bedish thought she had died and gone to heaven when she heard that the University of Hawai'i's historic preservation field school was coming to Kapahulu this summer.

UH student Geoff Mowrer helps instructor Lorraine Palumbo measure a window in the kitchen of the old principal's house of the Hawaii Seminar Language School. The students are doing an inventory this summer of historic buildings in the Kapahulu area.

Andrew Shimabuku • The Honolulu Advertiser

Bedish, head of the Kapahulu Center, better known as the old Japanese-language school on Campbell Avenue, was so excited, she picked up the phone and volunteered the school grounds as part of the project.

While she knows the long history of the neighborhood wedged between Waikiki and Kaimuki, others just driving through hardly give it a second thought.

Even William Chapman, who heads the historic preservation program at UH and runs the field school, was caught off guard.

"Just zooming through the neighborhood in a car, you don't really get a sense of it," Chapman said. "It's only once you get out and start walking around that you are surprised by how many historic buildings are still here."

So far, Chapman and his summer field school students have identified more than 100 commercial buildings, private residences and apartment complexes that are at least 50 years old in the neighborhood's areas they've been able to survey.

There are businesses with roots back to the territorial days. The Kapahulu Center and many homes date to the 1920s.

The buildings range from storefronts to two-story walkup apartments. There are Art Deco, Art Moderne and streamlined Moderne commercial buildings. There are Hawaiian plantation and Craftsman bungalow homes. There are even hints of Tudor and Mission-style architecture details in some of the buildings.

"There's not enough time to get everything done," said Geoff Mowrer, a graduate student with the inventory project. "We'll have to come back next year, too."

For the students working on the inventory and learning to draw detailed plans of some of the old buildings, the field school is a glimpse into Hawai'i's past. For Chapman and others, it's a vision of what the area might someday become as a historic preservation district.

"It's a little like walking into the past," said student Jeffrey Tripp of his work at the 1948 commercial building on Kapahulu Avenue and a nearby barbershop across from Leonard's Bakery.

"It really gives me a sense of Hawai'i's history and its people," said Catherine Reynolds, a Virginia graduate student who had never heard of Dickey roofs or single-wall construction before she came to the field school.

The exterior of the old principal's house in Kapahulu.

Andrew Shimabuku • The Honolulu Advertiser

Kapahulu's history dates back 150 years to the Great Mahele, when King Lunalilo was deeded a tract of 3,200 acres that went from Waikiki to Maunalani Heights — wild land then, with green shrubbery and dense trees.

One of the first private residences was built in 1889 by businessman Charles Snodgrass Martin, who sank a well onto his property at Campbell Avenue and Hinano Street, built a windmill, let his cattle roam around Diamond Head and sometimes sold pigs to Prince Kuhio, according to old news archives.

By the 1920s, when land could still be bought for as low as 25 cents a square foot, owners started subdividing property and creating the beginnings of the distinct residential and commercial areas that exist today.

The area between Lincoln and Kaimuki avenues, near where H-1 Freeway meets Kapahulu Avenue today, has many homes dating from that era, Mowrer said. The slightly askew street grid pattern imposed on the area is similar to what planners today advocate as the New Urbanism, Chapman said.

Chapman thinks the Kapahulu survey could be the start of an exciting new time for residents and business owners in the area.

"There's really a lot of potential that isn't being realized," he said. "You've got a neighborhood that's become known for antique stores, Hawaiiana dealers, surfboard shops and lots of restaurants.

All of that, he said, could benefit from participation in a historic preservation district.

Bedish, who let the students do architectural drawings of a 1930s-era plantation home on the grounds of the former Japanese school, fears that the area rapidly is losing its historic character, much like Kahala, Kaimuki, Mo'ili'lili and others before it.

"It really scares me when you see the number of old homes being torn down and being replaced by huge, two-story buildings," she said. "There's still a strong sense of community here, and we need to keep it."

The center plans a small museum that would tell the history of the neighborhood, where many of the residents went to the Japanese-language school as children and still use it as a senior citizen center today, she said.

"Right now, the focus is on documenting what's here," Mowrer said. "The land is just too valuable for some of the old homes to be kept. It's a shame, but at least if they are gone, there will be a record of what we've lost."

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.

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Correction: Joan Bedish's last name was misspelled in a previous version of this story.