Urbanizing Honolulu

HONOLULU – “I love this city!”

Those four simple words wouldn’t raise an eyebrow coming from someone in Paris or New York, where thousands of visitors annually swoon along the streets.

Honolulu, however, hasn’t always gotten a lot of love as an urban destination. In fact, for many travelers, it’s just a string of tiki-tacky Waikiki tourist traps.

But with a small but growing club and cafe scene downtown and an infusion of upscale boutique shopping and nightlife amid Waikiki’s T-shirt-and-towel sundries, Honolulu is starting to put itself on the hipster map.

For Patrick Park, a 39-year-old former Southern Californian who is now hopelessly in love with H-town, the city’s subdued energy is contagious.

“The best of all worlds is nature, beach, weather and culture,” says Park, a Morgan Stanley financial adviser and former club disc jockey who has lived and toured all over the United States and Europe.

“(Honolulu) doesn’t have the best of everything, but at least it has everything. It doesn’t need to be Manhattan. It’s not Paris, but it’s subtle and kind of hidden.”

Honolulu isn’t exactly an unknown quantity. The city of about 900,000 on the island of Oahu came in seventh – above Boston and San Diego – in Conde Nast Traveler magazine’s 2004 Readers Choice Awards.

And, according to the 2005 National Leisure Travel Monitor, it outpaces the likes of New York, San Diego, Los Angeles and Palm Springs as the city those between the ages of 26 and 40 and those 25 and under most want to visit.

But if it’s the promise of endless beach that lures them, the city’s increasing sophistication may surprise them. From trendy restaurants such as the Eurasian-fusion Indigo to the Contemporary Art Museum, dance clubs such as the Living Room (where the cast of “Lost” sometimes can be found) to local fashions designed by Zana Tsutakawa and brothers John and Gerald Polyasckos, there’s almost as much to do indoors these days in Honolulu as outdoors.

This is especially true in the often forgotten downtown/Chinatown area, where a quiet revolution is taking place along Hotel Street. Once alive with celebratory soldiers and sailors on leave, where every day was V-E Day, the area degenerated in recent years to a haven for drug dealers and vagrants.

Still, there was an upside: cheap real estate. So when Gelareh Khoie, inspired by the urban bohemia of San Francisco and London, decided to open an art/music/fashion space a year ago, she opted for Hotel Street.

Today, her thirtyninehotel – named after its address, and not a hotel – has been a neighborhood spark with the music- and film-oriented Next Door (where some of the Cinema Paradise independent film festival takes place) and Bar 35 (with its selection of more than 100 beers) popping up on either side.

Around the corner is Indigo and the Hawaii Theater, a beautifully restored 1922 rococo movie palace that plays host to a range of visiting alt-rockers from Sigur Ros to Aimee Mann. Gallery Night, the first Friday of the month when the galleries stay open late, draws large crowds.

But it’s all still cheek-by-jowl with old-school, wartime Honolulu. The hard-drinking Smith’s Union Bar, one of the oldest bars on the island, and Chinatown – the long-running, close-knit home of the Chinese-Hawaiian business community – remain the same as they ever were.

Not to mention there are still days and weeknights when the aimless and the homeless outnumber the new urban gentry. And, as many of Honolulu’s detractors have noted over the years, the city’s traffic can be stifling and much of the urban panorama is full of blandly ordinary architecture.

But Khoie remains optimistic.

“People are developing more urban sensibilities,” she says. “Lots of people are moving here from the mainland. And there’s a group that’s been trying to develop the arts and culture district in Chinatown for several years. They’ve been fighting the drugs and shadiness for a long time.

“A lot of people think Chinatown is really dangerous. (But) three years ago, there were only eight galleries participating (in Gallery Night); now there are 24. The movement I’ve been longing for has arrived.”

Halfway between downtown grit and Waikiki glitz lies Fisherman’s Wharf, a pierside restaurant that four nights a week morphs into the Living Room. With a musical menu ranging from underground hip-hop to R&B, a wall of glass overlooking the water and a 4 a.m. closing time, the Living Room is one of the hottest hangouts of the moment.

Of course, Waikiki remains Honolulu’s most famous neighborhood, but city officials admit that in recent years it had fallen closer to flea market than upmarket. But more than $1.5 billion in private and public investment – including newly bricked paving and waterfalls along signature Kalakaua Avenue – has transformed the area.

Today, the likes of Dior, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Tiffany and Cartier line Kalakaua with sparkling new stores, and more are coming. Ferragamo is due to open in November.

“We had some negative (responses) back in the ‘80s and mid-‘90s,” Les Enderton, executive director of the Oahu Visitors Bureau, says of tourists visiting Waikiki. “But over the last six to seven years, those kind of remarks have diminished markedly.”

One of the catalysts in Waikiki’s rebirth was the opening of the W Hotel in the late ‘90s. Its Wonderlounge, a more upscale mirror of the downtown clubs, is where the see-and-be-seen society kicks back.

W’s entry into the market occurred as other hotels, such as Aston Waikiki Beach Hotel with its “Aloha with attitude” catchphrase, decided to go for a retro-surf-tiki chic .

But the new Honolulu is about more than supping, shopping and sleeping. A clutch of small but well-curated museums deserves to be on any visitor’s itinerary.

The Contemporary Museum, in a stunning setting in the hills overlooking the city, has put together some intriguing shows such as the just-opened “Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art,” a traveling exhibit of more than 50 paintings, sculptures, photos and installations that tie together comedy and modern art. Separately, David Hockney’s “L’Enfant et les Sortileges” installation takes up an entire room.

If the art doesn’t appeal to you, the lush grounds and sculpture garden (including Michael Lin’s giant tennis-court-turned artwork “Tennis Dessus”) offer a green zone for contemplation, meditation or quiet conversation away from the hustle of the city.

The Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Bishop Museum and Planetarium take a more historical approach, offering artifacts from Asia and Polynesia, areas that provided much of Hawaii’s population. The Academy also has a limited but interesting modern-art room, with works from Francis Bacon and Richard Diebenkorn among others.

As Hawaii is the only state once to have had a royal ruling family, a visit to the `Iolani Palace is a must. This National Historic Landmark was built for King David Kalakaua and ceased to be a monarch’s mansion in 1893 with the end of the reign of Queen Lili’uokalani and the addition of Hawaii to American territory.

Of course, one of Honolulu’s biggest tourist attractions remains Pearl Harbor, with its USS Arizona and USS Bowfin Submarine museums and other sites of interest.

It’s this newfound balance between old and recent attractions, the expected and the unexpected, that’s making Honolulu such an undiscovered urban treasure.

And locals are confident. Honolulu rapper Emirc (pronounced “immerse”) tapped into the feeling of civic patriotism when he encouraged concertgoers at the recent Unity05 concert here to “Throw your H’s up in the air.”

Patrick Park, who moved to Honolulu in March 2004, is one of those who may not be literally following Emirc’s advice, but he shares the sentiments.

“When you’re from L.A., nothing really feels new,” he says. “And then living in Amsterdam, it really makes me even more picky. My standards are pretty high, partying in Paris, London, Ibiza.

“But from what I’ve experienced, (Honolulu’s) pretty good. … And there are a lot of people coming here from all over the country.”