One is an abandoned boathouse, once part of a late tycoon's estate. It looks like a portal; anglers and sunbathers pass through it to reach the ocean. Another is East Honolulu's answer to Rockefeller Center, where each December a Christmas tree lights up the neighborhood of Kaimuki. Another is home to a very urban loi kalo (taro patch), its rows of heart-shaped leaves surrounded by concrete.
Honolulu has grander parks, the ones in the guidebooks, where we gather for sporting events, where we haul our tents and grills. The city's mini parks are not those. To seek Honolulu's mini parks is to slip into the city's hidden and sometimes forgotten corners. They are leftover spaces, like the dough scraps left behind after cutting out cookies, remnants that have been repurposed into places of respite, places where you'll find new mothers doing stroller barre, dog and cyclist and toddler meet-ups, parking for the Sony Open golf tournament, Honolulu Marathon pit stops, meditation, tai chi.
Puu o Kaimuki Mini Park (2.31 acres), a.k.a. Christmas Tree Park for the lighted tree the Hawaiian Electric Company installs every year, sits on a hillside above a fire station. For decades the Christmas tree has been a holiday beacon, but in recent years neighborhood groups that remove invasive species have excavated the park's ancient history: It might have been the site of Kukuionapeha, a heiau (temple) that Polynesian navigators would use. A new mural on the park's cell phone tower depicts stars and starlight, a nod to the wayfinding past. Today people visit to take in views of Honolulu in all directions.
The city has thirty-two mini parks, mostly concentrated in urban Honolulu. Some are truly mini: The smallest, Wilder Avenue Mini Park, across from a 7-Eleven, is .4 acres, a sliver that looks like part of the adjacent house's yard. Others, like Pohakupu Mini Park (the largest), catty corner from Castle Medical Center in Kailua, is a not-so-mini 3.54 acres. The term "mini park" may refer to size but also to larger parks without facilities-notably bathrooms-though they may have benches, picnic tables and playgrounds.
"In some cases there were parcels of land bought or acquired by the city, and there were little remnants of the acquired land that were not needed for the intended use," says Nathan Serota, spokesman for the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation. "So they were delegated to DPR to make a green space for the community to enjoy. These mini parks can help to provide some space for areas that might not otherwise be able to fit, say, a neighborhood or community park." Most of Honolulu's mini parks were created before the early 1970s, tracking a national trend in "vest pocket parks, hot button items in the 1960s," according to the New York Times. Some of the first appeared in Europe after World War II, when bombed-out building sites were turned into small parks, and by the 1950s the idea was gaining traction in America's densest cities. A 1967 American Society of Planning Officials report noted 200 pocket parks in New York City, 29 in Baltimore and 150 in Philadelphia had been completed or were in the planning stage. In 1967 alone, New York City parks commissioner Thomas Hoving helped create nine pocket parks, including Paley Park in midtown Manhattan, a crown jewel among urban oases, measuring just one-tenth of an acre, featuring a twenty-foot-waterfall and bounded by buildings on three sides. "Utopia would mean a park, some large, some small, every four or five blocks," Hoving had said in his big push for little landscapes.
A volunteer plants kalo (taro) at Loi Kalo Mini Park in Kalihi.
Honolulu's closest version to Paley Park is Robert W. Wilcox Mini Park (.32 acre), one of the most urban parks, named for the legislator who led two rebellions in 1889 and 1895 against the foreign interests that had seized control of Hawaii. His statue stands in the mostly paved parcel, hemmed in by Walmart and Ross in downtown Honolulu. There used to be a water feature in one corner, but it's been turned off, rendering moot many of the prohibited activities listed on the park's sign (bathing, wading, swimming, polluting the water). Still, it's one of the most visited mini parks; its concrete benches, shaded by palms and trees, are among the few places to sit in downtown Honolulu.
Prohibited at Loi Kalo Mini Park: fishing, likely the only mini park where this needs to be listed on the sign. This mini park in Kalihi is not to be confused with Kalo Mini Park in Moiliili, a forlorn parcel wedged between the H-1freeway and residential and commercial buildings, which has no kalo (but a great dog park). Loi Kalo Mini Park has lots, thanks to guerrilla kalo farmer Robert Silva. The park lies at the end of a narrow alley between a Mexican restaurant and a Buddhist temple. The tight passage gives way to a parking lot of about a dozen stalls, many taken by regulars who eye everyone who comes and goes. But enter through the opening in the fence and the mini park (2.31 acres) opens up before you, a lush field with a pond in the middle and loi on its banks. Silva stands shin-deep in mud, wearing a shirt that says Mud Taropy. A cluster of kalo slips lies nearby, ready to be planted once he clears out some of the sediment.
Silva has planted about twenty varieties of kalo here: the wavy-edged pilialoha; moi, excellent for pounding into poi; the black-stemmed lauloa eleele ula. Wherever Silva finds a freshwater source-a trickle running alongside Pali Highway, a muddy patch behind the Waikiki Shell indicating the presence of a spring, a slender waterfall at Manoa Valley District Park-he plants kalo. "Aia i hea ka wai a Kane? Where is the water of Kane?" he says, referencing a Hawaiian chant about the god of creation and his gift of wai, or fresh water. "Show me wai, let's do it." A lot of water flows beneath Loi Kalo Mini Park: It sits in an area known as Niuhelewai, fed by freshwater springs that once sustained a vast network of loi kalo. Niuhelewai was also a place of healing for Hawaiian royalty and home to Haumea, goddess of fertility.
Mini parks are often artifacts of urban planning, scraps of land left over after development repurposed as public spaces. And some, like Date Street Mini Park, preserve other artifacts of the city's past. Above, Date Street Mini Park's "mystery building" is an old wastewater pumping station, decomissioned in 1967.
Silva first came to the park with the Hawaiian club at Damien High School, on the other side of the park's fence and across Kapalama Canal, where he was teaching geometry. "This place was always here, but not always somebody taking care of it," he says. When he returned in 2015, about fifteen years after his first visit, and now an automotive instructor at the nearby Honolulu Community College, the park was "horrible," he says. It was overgrown with head-high California grass so thick that he could walk over the pond "without my feet getting wet, like I was walking on water, like I was supernatural. That's when I figured I gotta fix it." He cleared out the grass and trash-needles, broken glass bottles, a bike-and returned it to an "oasis in a concrete jungle." He comes at least once a week, sometimes with a group of about ten people, to work the loi, and he organizes monthly community workdays.
He points to the trees at the far end of the park, nesting sites for manuoku, a native seabird that, on Oahu, curiously nests only in urban Honolulu. Along the fence, there are kukui trees, the nuts of which he'll sometimes press for oil to condition lauhala mats. He once found what looked like a pet's grave, marked by a stone spray-painted "Rest in Peace Honey Girl." But one day, he and a crew flipped it over to cut the grass and discovered it was a tombstone from 1840. He traced it to a grave at Kawaiahao Church and returned it. He shows me where it was, near a dead ulu (breadfruit) tree, which he says inexplicably died earlier this year. But two keiki trees have sprung up nearby. It's said that the ulu tree is the earthly embodiment of Haumea.
Oama are schooling inside the harbor wall. Thousands of the tiny fish move as one, a dark cloud in the water. On the other side of a low wall, fishermen set up poles-last week they caught ulua (giant trevally). The handful of fishermen and sunbathers passing through Kokee Beach Mini Park are more interested in the ocean than in the melancholic three-story boathouse decaying behind them, reminiscent of Venice. The boathouse and private harbor were once part of the Kaiser estate, which also included a pink mansion and circular homes for poodles, built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser in 1959. Since Kaiser it's been owned by the eccentric billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto, who purchased the estate for $42.5 million in 1988 before simply walking away from the house. About a decade ago the entire estate was listed for $80 million. On the narrow strip of sand near the property, two women spread towels and open bags of potato chips while the fishermen pick bait from their coolers.
Mini parks are often artifacts of urban planning, scraps of land left over after development repurposed as public spaces. And some, like Date Street Mini Park, preserve other artifacts of the city's past. Above, Date Street Mini Park's "mystery building" is an old wastewater pumping station, decomissioned in 1967.
Kokee is one of the city's two beachfront mini parks, just half a mile apart. While many mini parks feel like interlopers, Kokee (.46 acre) and Koko Kai (.6 acre) feel especially so, nestled among the mansions of Portlock, one of Honolulu's most expensive neighborhoods (and one of Kaiser's many real-estate developments, built in the '60s). Of the two, Koko Kai-though no one calls it that-is more well known, an undeveloped lot that leads to a dramatic sea cliff, teeming with teens jumping off into the calmer waters of winter and with expert surfers and their spectators in the summer months, when the waves kick up. Often people stand too close to the edge and waves sweep them off-a life preserver hangs on the lava wall both as a warning and a necessity.
Greg Kugle, an attorney, grew up just down the road from Koko Kai Mini Park and has been surfing the breaks off Portlock for forty years. "Physically, [the park] has not changed at all," he says. What has changed is the crowds. "In the early '80s the only people that would go down there would be the guys that surfed. Maybe occasionally fishermen. But it was very quiet and pretty much unknown." Signs of the times: "When I was a kid, some older teenagers cemented a diving board into place down there. Now a private citizen has been putting up warning signs on how dangerous it is." Every surfer complains of crowds at their local surf spots, but China Walls and Walls, which breaks right up against the cliff, are an extreme level of mayhem. "It's this strange mix that you don't encounter [elsewhere while surfing]-people swimming and snorkeling and jumping down from on top and hitting you," Kugle says. And because they underestimate the danger of the waves, currents and rocks, in recent years he's had to rescue ten to fifteen people each summer. "It's a really dangerous place to surf-it's hard enough surfing along the wall [without a] bunch of people in front of you not knowing what they're doing. Either they're getting in trouble and you're having to rescue them or they're in your way and it's just an extra element of danger that you don't need." And yet, when there are waves, "pretty much spring to fall, I still go there every day."
A mural by Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos on the cell phone tower at Puu o Kaimuki Mini Park hints at the site's ancient past as a navigational heiau (temple). Its name, Kukuionapeha (Napeha's beacon), alludes to the guiding light, visible from miles away, that oriented Polynesian seafarers.
"I started coming here when I was under a tremendous amount of psychological and emotional stress," says "Carl," a Pukele Avenue Mini Park regular. He calls the park his sanctuary. The triangular patch (.6 acre) in Palolo Valley is Oahu's oldest mini park, established in 1930. In the world of mini parks, it's just right: neither too small nor too big, with a few trees, a playset, basketball court and benches. A steady trickle of children and adults usually flows through the park, but on the stormy day I visit, it's empty. As soon as the rain lets up, a family comes out, and the father towels down the slide and bars for his kids. They come every Sunday. An older Vietnamese woman comes every morning for an hour-long workout that involves clapping her hands, pushups against a bench, laps around the basketball court and massaging her face.
When Carl was undergoing a divorce, he needed an escape and came to Pukele almost every day for seven months. "I was really upset all the time. And so I would just walk, and then I found this park," he says. "I didn't know it was here." Once he found it, he came six days a week during breaks from work nearby. "It's convenient, it's shaded, it's secluded. I don't feel exposed, in the way I feel when I'm anywhere near work or even anywhere on Waialae Avenue."
Now that things have calmed down for him, he doesn't come as often, but he'll still meet people here for quiet conversations (or walking interviews), finding that when he's in even a little slip of nature, "you're more creative, it's more generative." Pukele Mini Park's regulars are hard-pressed to name anything particularly special about the space-just that it's close and a place to play or rest. But what more can one hope for from these tiny patches of respite, the leftover tats of an urban quilt?
