Hilo feels like a sleepy South Seas port off the pages of Somerset Maugham. The town climbs a slope leading up to the volcano, Mauna Kea, and looks out over Hilo Bay. Fan-like crowns of palm trees wave over corrugated tin roofs. Rows of wooden storefronts facing the harbor project an improvised rawness, as though the carpenters had just put away their hammers and saws. You can almost smell the pine resin.
As for Hilo’s more substantial buildings, they exist in a kind of aesthetic time-warp—Haili Church, the Classic Revival Federal Building, the Renaissance Revival Kaikodo Building, the vaguely Moorish Palace Theater. Architecture is always so much more than just building. To “read” architecture is to read history. Hawaii is often thought of as a paradise, but paradise is timeless, without a history. And Hawaii’s history, reflected in its architecture, is one of both cultural confrontation and cultural accommodation.
In the center of Hilo stands Haili Church, constructed of wood in the late 1850s. It would not look out of place in a Vermont village. The church is a monument to the impact the missionaries made on Hawaii: this is a church-going town. Haili Church’s plain-spoken spire, competing with the baroque, domed steeple of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church further up the hill, is a landmark on the skyline (such as it is) of downtown Hilo. Both Haili Church and St. Joseph’s are imports, introduced species that have brought New England Protestantism and Roman Catholicism to
