In addition to what the missionaries and sugar bosses built, one of the most pleasing architectural strains in Hilo is Asian. Hongwanji Mission temples built by the Japanese community look like hybrids between churches and pagodas. They are topped with domes where, on churches, you would expect to see steeples. And inside, geometrical stained-glass windows in glowing primary colors look like what you would see in a Methodist or Presbyterian church on the mainland. Many residences sport the upturned eaves of pagodas. My favorite is the lime-green and Chinese red pagoda faced entirely with glossy ceramic tiles of extraordinary beauty at the Chinese cemetery. Graves, neatly tended, fill the hillside behind the pagoda.

If these up-curving eaves really do serve the purpose, as some commentators seem to think, of projecting rain further from the house, it would make sense here in Hilo, which has an average annual rainfall upwards of 150 inches. Christianity and Buddhism meet on this rainy island without apparent friction. A building on the south side of town that looks for all the world like a pagoda has a notice-board in front declaring it to be the United Community Church.

Across town at the Suisan fish market, fishermen bring their catch up to the shore: ahi (tuna), mahi mahi (dolphinfish), tako (octopus), and other seafood selling at a quarter of the price one pays on the mainland. Le tout Hilo shows up down near the waterfront for the twice-weekly farmers’ market to “talk story,” catch up on the day’s gossip, and sample the fragrant offerings of fresh exotic fruit and vegetables, juices, local coffee beans, homemade tamales and sushi, flowers like anthariums and ginger blossoms. On Saturdays I like to skip breakfast at home and have an ambulatory breakfast at the market.

Wherever one goes—to the Saturday market, to the mall, wherever—it is hard not to be struck by Hilo’s racially mixed population. As “Hilo, My Hometown,” a song from an earlier era, less self-conscious about such things, puts it, “See the smiling faces / Of the many races, / And you’ll be smiling too.” I don’t know of any other song about a city that makes that particular boast! Statistically, 17% of Hilo’s population is Caucasian and 15% Native Hawaiian. 38% of Hilo’s residents are of Asian decent —primarily Japanese. In addition nearly 30% of its population classify themselves as being of two or more races. This really is a rainbow society. Native Hawaiians have intermarried with Filipinos, Chinese, Caucasians from the mainland, and the Portuguese, or Portagee, who also came here to work on the plantations. More recently Samoans, Koreans, Thais, Vietnamese and other Asians have made their way to the islands.

Between the market street and the bay the city created a large park on Banyan Drive after the ruinous tsunami of 1960, which devastated what had been a warren of houses, mostly Japanese. The waterfront park is dotted with ornamental ponds, little pagodas, pavilions and Japanese-looking bridges and islands. It is a Blue Willow plate come to life. The park honors the many Japanese who perished in the tsunami and is filled at all hours of the day with strollers, joggers, families with their keikis—or little children—and people doing tai chi.

 

So much of Hawaii has been turned into a tourist paradise that I am glad to live near a town that still works for a living. Hilo is refreshingly ordinary. Its waterfront is a reminder of what seaside cities like New York and San Francisco who have lost their working harbors are missing. I like going down to the docks to see the inter-island cargo barge load up with freight containers, fork-lifts scooting busily around the wharf. Those enormous triple-decker cruise ships that debouch tourists for a day are a magical sight from the hills where we live above the town, when we see them steaming out of the harbor in the early evenings, their decks illuminated, like something from a maritime fairy tail.

School kids flock together after class here like everywhere else, but they are polite and well-spoken. Most Hawaiians are brought up in large families, and they learn their manners early. Hilo has its homeless population too, but somehow they don’t seem as desperate or put-upon as they do in New York or London or Dublin or San Francisco—perhaps because the climate is clement. It must be easier to live outside here, to shelter under a banyan tree when it rains, to drink your wine or smoke your pakalolo out in the open.

The impression that Hilo exists in the backwash of vanished Sugar Coast prosperity is inescapable. I am not invoking anything like  vanished grandeur—Hilo is much too down-home for that. But clearly there was money here once, and a lot of it. In addition to the institutional buildings in the Kino’ole part of town I have already described, the museum-piece Art Deco Woolworths building on Bayfront now houses a down-at-the-heels multiplex on one side, and a little Indian restaurant on the other. And what used to be the Hilo Ironworks down by the harbor, Art Deco witness to bygone industry, houses among other things a frame shop.

Another of my favorite places is the Palace Theatre, an authentically splendid temple of cinema from Hollywood’s high and palmy days. Its marquee and the vertical neon sign for the theatre are green. At night the letters spelling out P-A-L-A-C-E come alive in red—not a brash, declarative scarlet, but a mellowed vermilion in keeping with the town’s aura of faded luxury. It is easy to imagine the theatre filled with workers off the plantations on their day off eating popcorn, chattering away in pidgin and marveling at the exploits of Tom Mix and Laurel and Hardy, enraptured by Theda Bara and Carole Lombard, impressed by Clark Gable’s masculine sexiness and sense of command. The men’s room, piss-whiffy as it is, has a little anteroom with chairs and, of all things, bookcases. I think it must have been a smoking lounge. The Palace is a grand building, more like a drafty basilica than a barn.