Looking for Old Lahaina

It’s dawn, and I feel like I’m 15 again: dropped off by my mom, hours early for my summer job, free to dawdle along the sea wall and eye the surfers who have eyes only for the waves off the harbor break.

I’ve got a weekend to roam the streets of my old hometown; to remember why I’m fiercely loyal to my native island despite living in Honolulu; to remember why I love going away but love coming back even more.

The early morning fishermen look the same as 30 years ago, in their ragged T-shirts and rubber zoris, with their bamboo poles arching over the wall and their pickup trucks parked behind them on Front Street. The surfers still guide hand-me-down bikes with one hand and grasp their boards with the other, though more of them have dreadlocks now, and speak with Brazilian or Aussie accents.

Lahaina harbor juts out to my left as I face the sea; early charters dodge past the surfers, taking tourists to snorkel or hunt for marlin.

In my day, the sea wall was covered by haphazard thatching that rustled with mice. It’s been rebuilt and now fronts a wider promenade outfitted with planters and benches, upon which, this morning, a street lady arranges her flowers, Bible and rows of tropical fruit.

It’s only at this early hour that I can recapture the slow-moving, pre-tourist days of my onetime home--the Lahaina of the past that few visitors see.

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A village of perhaps 2,300 when the first Europeans sailed past in the late 1770s, Lahaina and the rest of the western coastline of Maui is home to nearly 15,000 people now, plus several thousand tourists, who come each day to lie on the beaches at nearby Kaanapali and Kapalua resorts and to explore this quirky town.

Forty-five minutes from Maui’s Kahului Airport by scenic Honoapi’ilani Highway, Lahaina is built on a sliver of land defined by its main thoroughfare, Front Street. This narrow two-lane road forms a half-moon, beginning and ending at Honoapi’ilani. The town is just three blocks wide at its deepest point, and 2.9 miles long.

Out past the sea wall, is Auau Channel, known in whaling days as the Lahaina Roads, a narrow, protected sea path between Maui and the neighboring islands of Molokai and Lanai. Behind me, a hill rises steeply to the West Maui Mountains. The sugar cane fields there are steadily giving way to new housing developments.

The name Lahaina is variously translated as “merciless sun,” or “cruel sun,” and the brown hills and the pink tourist noses speak to this meaning. But in the Hawaiian language’s poetic fashion, the word may also mean “the land that was told about.” Also an apt definition: Lahaina is a place of which many stories are told.

“No moa fish, but everybody still tryin’,” says Fumio Nishimoto, in lilting pidgin English. Nishimoto is an 82-year-old lifelong Lahainan who, like many locals, says he’s never eaten at any of the restaurants that, in the past 10 years, have made Lahaina a stop for foodies. “Expensive, I tink. Home mo’ bettah.”

Typical of the circumspect nisei (second-generation Japanese-American), he’s reluctant to talk about himself at first. But he doesn’t hesitate to examine his questioner. In what year did I graduate from Lahainaluna? Who were my parents? “John Duarte you granfaddah? Oh, yea, I heard of him!”

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I’ve been properly vetted and we embark on a game of “Do you remember?” dating back to the ‘60s, when California parents handed their sons a few hundred bucks and sent them to this surfing paradise for the summer. The blond boys would crash six to a $50-a-month plantation house, surf all day and maybe bus dishes at night.

Right behind us, at 752 Front, was Yamamoto Store, a uniquely Lahainan bait shop and soda fountain where Mrs. Yamamoto made delicious hamburgers tasting faintly of shoyu (soy sauce) and ginger for 25 cents each--virtually the only hot food most summer surfers could afford. Locals called Mr. Nishimoto, “Yes, yes,” because that’s how he invariably greeted customers.

What does Nishimoto think of today’s Lahaina?

“Front Street no much change,” he says. “In the back, change.” He means the area inland of town, around the Pioneer Sugar Mill, where he worked as a machinist for 40 years. The mill is one of only three left in the islands, where once there were dozens. Pioneer has laid off many workers, sugar lands have been sold for resorts or developed into housing.

He eyes a noisy grading machine. The county is widening and repaving Front Street, to ease traffic flow.

“Now they goin’ teah’ Front Street up. . . . I don’ know. . . .”

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Today, Front Street is lined with a Planet Hollywood, T-shirt shops, curio vendors, jewelry stores, galleries and restaurants. The sidewalks are clogged, the street traffic slow moving from 9 to 9 every day. Locals avoid the place.

But much of Front Street is also a National Historic Landmark and a county-managed historic district, home to several museums and subject to development restrictions that have kept its character by prohibiting merchants from significantly altering its turn-of-the-century buildings.

Preservationists recall how once this was “the Versailles of Hawaii,” home to high chiefs and the first king of all the islands. Later came whalers, Christian missionaries, plantation owners, hippies and adventurers.

Keoki Freeland, part-Hawaiian grandson of the founder of the 95-year-old Pioneer Inn and deputy director of the Hawaiian Restoration Foundation, says Hawaii’s history can be divided into four distinct periods--Pre-Contact, before 1778; Early Contact, 1778-1820; Missionary/Whaling, 1820-1870, and Plantation Times, 1870-1985--and Lahaina, where I have come to wander and remember, offers tastes of them all.

Lahaina has relatively little evidence of Pre-Contact time. An exception is the Hauola (“life giving”) stone, which fronts one of the nicest spots in Lahaina, the front lawn of the public library, next to the Pioneer Inn at 680 Wharf St.

Look for the red-and-yellow historic site sign at the corner of the lawn, then stand on the sea wall and look down. The largest of the stones below was revered by Hawaiians as a healing place.

Two groups--the Friends of Moku’ula and Hui O Wa’a Kaulua--are working to preserve more of Pre-Contact Hawaii. The Friends are urging further excavation of another site where chiefs lived and a famous lizard goddess reigned. A sign explaining the excavations and the Friends’ efforts is on the 600 block of Front Street at Malu’ulu O Lele Park.

Hui O Wa’a Kaulua is building a traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoe, capable of navigating extraordinary distances in the open ocean. The group hopes eventually to make Kamehameha Iki Park, in the 500 block of Front Street, into a Hawaiian culture education center.

The Early Contact period began when Capt. James Cook landed on the Big Island of Hawaii. During this time, King Kamehameha I, the man who united a patchwork of clans into the Hawaiian nation, often visited Maui and made Lahaina his capital in 1802.

After the Europeans came, Kamehameha and his descendants began the blending of native and Western ways that led to the near loss of the Hawaiian culture. Kamehameha took guns and iron, but never would sleep in his so-called “Brick Palace,” preferring breezy, sweet-smelling pili grass huts. The palace, built for him in 1801 by some shipwrecked Australians, crumbled years ago; its foundation can be seen on the front lawn of the Lahaina Library (680 Wharf St.).

Hale Piula, “iron-roof house,” was a Western-style stone building with surrounding piazza on Front Street near Maulu’ulu O Lele Park. It was built in the 1830s for Kamehameha III, the last king to reign from Lahaina. When Kamehameha III moved the capital to Honolulu in the 1840s, the Hale Piula stones were carried down the street and used to build today’s Old Lahaina Courthouse, on Wharf Street between Hotel and Canal.

The courthouse served variously as a customs house (in the late 1800s), courthouse (early in this century) and police station (mid-1900s). Now the building, whose coral stone walls Freeland says are “literally melting” with age and weather, houses the Lahaina Art Society. It shares the block with a magnificent banyan tree, planted in 1873, under which art shows are held daily.

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The first whalers dropped anchor off Lahaina in 1819; the first missionaries arrived in 1823. The two groups would lock horns for the next 50 years.

By the end of this period, whaling was effectively dead (petroleum and electricity had replaced whale oil) and a generation of missionaries had intermarried with Hawaiians, and become influential in business and government.

The missionary/whaling period is the primary focus of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation’s efforts. Its showpiece is the Baldwin House Museum at Front and Dickenson streets. This cluster of whitewashed buildings shows how faithfully the missionaries tried to recreate their New England origins. Some of the period pieces were owned by the missionary Baldwin family (which acquired vast land holdings and entered the ranching and plantation businesses in the second generation).

A good introduction to the whaling period is another foundation project, the square-rigged Carthaginian II on the Lahaina Harbor in front of the Pioneer Inn. This replica is all museum below-decks, with films and displays.

Also worth a visit, not least because the drive offers a great view of Lahaina and the channel beyond, is Hale Pa’i, located at Lahainaluna High School, my alma mater. Hale Pa’i was a printing house established by the missionaries at the school, which was dedicated to teaching Hawaiian children to read and write.

The school and printing house museum are the top of Lahainaluna Road, which begins between the 700 and 800 blocks of Front Street and runs right up the hill behind the town, past the Pioneer Mill.

When Hawaii’s capital moved to Honolulu, with its large, deep-water harbor, Lahaina’s power vacuum was filled by commercial monarchs: King Sugar and Queen Pineapple.

Besides Pioneer Mill, there was the Baldwin Packers pineapple cannery, which perfumed an entire side of town. Pineapple was grown at higher elevations farther west--in what is now called Kapalua--and trucked to the cannery. Teenagers spent summers both in the fields and in the cannery building, a rite of passage for many of my classmates. (The cannery is now a mall.)

In the early 1900s, Lahaina was the quintessential plantation town with company-supplied housing and social lives built on mill-sponsored baseball teams. Workers could charge movie tickets to their mill paychecks, and the street lights went out soon after the film was over.

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Plantation times brought perhaps the most profound change that Hawaiian society has weathered: nearly 100 years of immigration by Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Pacific Islander and Mexican laborers.

Much of plantation Lahaina remains. Of these spots, my favorites are the Wo Hing Temple Museum, at 875 Front St., and Maria Lanakila Catholic Church, at 712 Wainee St., a few blocks inland from Front. Wo Hing was built by a Chinese fraternal organization, one of many formed by Chinese immigrants to do everything from sending funds to families back home to housing bachelor workers. Wo Hing was a place of worship and a meeting place. It’s been beautifully restored.

Maria Lanakila (“Mary of Victory”), built in 1846, has also been returned to its former glory, with cool, thick, stucco walls, glistening stained glass windows and feathered kahilis (tufted standards once carried before Hawaiian royalty) flanking the altar.

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I walk the length of Front Street, drinking in the hodgepodge of history: plantation-era houses with peaked, Thai-style roofs, shaded porches and dead cars and sleeping dogs in the yard; gardens of hibiscus, plumeria, pikake, ti leaves and mango trees; an astounding number of hippie-era Volkswagens and mailboxes shaped like whales.

I hum some words of an old song by the late Hawaii songwriter Kui Lee:

The morning sunrise, the golden sunset,

in Lahaina, Lahainaluna.”

Nishimoto, my fisherman friend, need not worry. The Lahaina we knew may be gone: the plantation town dusted with red dirt from the cane trucks and scented with the potent mill-smell of sugar stalks being ground and cooked. But this place has a spirit--Hawaiians say mana--that will survive us both.

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GUIDEBOOK: Lahaina Layout

Getting there: United, Delta and American offer nonstop flights from LAX to Kahului airport on Maui. Restricted advance-purchase fares start at $438 round trip. Lahaina is about 20 miles from the airport.

Where to stay: Lahaina Inn, 127 Lahainaluna Road, Lahaina, HI 96761 (telephone [800] 669-3444 or [808] 661-0577, fax [808] 667-9480). Victorian-style B&B; with antiques and comfy brass beds. Highly recommended for dinner. Rates: $89-$140 per room. Plantation Inn, 174 Lahainaluna Road, Lahaina, HI 96761 (tel. [808] 667-9225, fax [808] 667-9293). Victorian-style mansion; suites in modern wing; memorable food at Gerard’s restaurant in front rooms and veranda of main house. Rates: $104-$195, $119-$219 (high season, Dec. 20-March 31) per room. Pioneer Inn, 658 Ward St., Lahaina, HI 96761 (tel. [800] 457-5457 or [808] 661-3636, fax [808] 667-5708); 95-year-old inn, once housed bachelor plantation workers; unexceptional rooms but lovely upstairs veranda overlooking harbor; outside rooms can be noisy. Rates: $90-$225 per room.

Where to eat: Avalon, 844 Front St., (local tel. 667-5559). Asia-Pacific food, chili-seared salmon “tiki”-style is dramatic and delicious; entrees $19-$30. David Paul’s Lahaina Grill, 127 Lahainaluna Road (in Lahaina Inn, tel. 667-5117). Elegant but not stuffy; Kalua duck with wine sauce a specialty; offers fixed-price dinners; entrees $19-$32. Cheeseburger in Paradise, 811 Front St. (tel. 661-4855). Open-air, burger-and-fries eatery; very popular; burgers $7-$10.

For more information: The Lahaina Restoration Foundation (includes the Baldwin House, Carthaginian II, Hale Pa’aheo prison, Hale Pa’i printing house and Wo Hing Temple), 120 Dickenson St., Lahaina, HI 96761; tel. (808) 661-3262. Maui Visitors Bureau, 1727 Wili Pa Loop, Wailuku, Maui 96793; tel. (808) 244-3530.

--W.A.