Haleiwa Town: A Self-Guided Walk

Start with the two buildings that look carved from sugar. The Yoshida twins went up in 1923, built by Nosaka Contractors for Matsuji and Hatsune Yoshida out of hand-cut lava blocks. The street faces are plastered smooth; the sides are bare stone. When Kamehameha Schools rebuilt Haleiwa Store Lots, finished in 2016, it kept them.

A few steps away is the wood-frame store from about 1904 where Sego and Tayo Tanaka ran a tailor and dry goods shop. Mamoru and Helen Matsumoto took it over and opened Matsumoto Grocery there on February 13, 1951.

Five years later they began selling shave ice from a hand-cranked machine from Japan that they fitted with a motor. Their son Stanley ran the shop from 1976.

The chamber’s bronze plaque is on the building. Matsumoto is open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (closed Thanksgiving, December 25 and January 1); the Matsumoto Shave Ice review has the menu and what to order.

In 1832 the missionaries John and Ursula Emerson, helped by High Chief Gideon Laʻanui, started a church near the mouth of Anahulu Stream on Waialua Bay. By 1841 an adobe church stood where the cemetery is now.

The third church, built of wood in 1890, used lumber donated by Queen Liliʻuokalani. She also gave hymnals, chandeliers and a wall clock.

The clock has no numerals. The twelve letters of her name stand in for the hours.

The building in front of you is the fourth. Theodore Vierra designed it, Erica Karawina made the stained glass, rose window included, and it was dedicated in June 1961. The ʻiwa-bird weathervane on the steeple went up in 1985. This is a working church with Sunday worship at 10 a.m.; look from the street.

This corner, where Haleiwa Road leaves the highway, is the hotel site: the Oahu Railway and Land Company’s Haleiwa Hotel from the intro stood here.

It was torn down in the early 1950s.

The site later held the Sea View Inn (1955), the Chart House (1989) and now Haleiwa Joe’s, which opens for dinner nightly from 4:30 to 9.

Haleiwa Road heads west from here, the start of the optional spur below.

The double arches are the town’s postcard. They replaced a wooden bridge in 1921: the Anahulu Stream Bridge, designed by engineer Fred Ohrt and architect Guy Rothwell. Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation counts it as one of only two bridges of its type left in Hawaii.

To the city it is Kamehameha Highway Bridge No. 603. A rehabilitation began on April 29, 2024: concrete repair, corrosion-control anodes and new paint, with the work closing one sidewalk at a time. From the north bank, Surf N Sea is the next building.

The yellow-and-brown building at the north end of the bridge dates to 1921 and began as a general store. In the early 1930s the Miura family ran a dry goods and tailor shop here and lived upstairs. The Ochiai family followed with a grocery until 1944.

They kept a light burning upstairs for the sampans moored in the stream.

The Liskey family opened Surf N Sea in the mid-1960s, selling hardware, guns, ammunition and dive gear. Joe Green’s family runs it now, and Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation calls it the longest-running surf shop in Hawaii. The foundation also notes remnants of the Oahu Railway and Land Company line on the ocean side of the building.

Loko Ea is a Hawaiian fishpond in the Kawailoa ahupuaʻa. Mālama Loko Ea Foundation has cared for it since 2009 on Kamehameha Schools land, and its executive director has called it a 400-year-old pond.

The Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau listed its mullet among the choice foods of the chief Kākuhihewa’s childhood. Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation records that it was later a summer retreat of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the same queen whose name is on the church clock.

The foundation calls it a sacred space and runs it as a working site, not a park. The way in is a community workday: the third Saturday of each month, 9 a.m. to noon, with lunch provided (November 21 and December 19 in 2026). Register on lokoea.org, and wear clothes you do not mind getting wet and muddy.

The turnaround, and the halfway rest stop. This 12.7-acre park was built in 1939, during the years the city was putting up its Art Deco parks. A poured-concrete wall runs along the highway with lawns and a pavilion behind it; Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation credits the design to architect Harry Sims Bent, and the park is part of the city’s Art Deco Parks and Playgrounds listing.

It has the public restrooms and showers on the loop, plus parking and a bus stop. From here the walk heads back south on Kamehameha Highway. The return retraces the main street, so cross at a crosswalk and take the other side back.

The Waialua Courthouse went up in 1913: wood frame, T-shaped, Neo-Classical Revival, with deep eaves against the sun and stone footings. Over the years it served the Waialua District as a post office, a health center, a courtroom and a jail; the jail cells were in the basement under the single story.

It has been on the state’s historic register since 1979, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs has held the 1.06-acre property under a state lease since 1998. There are no published public hours, so this one is an exterior stop. The Store Lots lot is about 0.2 miles south.

Work on the breakwater began in 1955; the bulkhead walls and slips were finished in 1968. The harbor runs along the road about 0.1 to 0.2 miles from the hotel corner.

The beach park just west of the harbor has lifeguards daily from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on the state’s ocean safety list, plus restrooms, parking and a bus stop. The North Shore waves guide covers which North Shore beaches break when.

Reverend Muroyama came over from Kauai to start the first Jodo temple on Oahu, drawn by the Japanese plantation workers around Waialua. At the end of 1913 the mission bought the old Waialua Hotel, known as the Ocean House at Waialua, for $12,000, converted it into a temple, and took the Haleiwa name the same year.

The temple in use today dates to 1975. On November 22, 2019, the Hawaii Historic Places Review Board voted 8 to 0 to list it on the Hawaii Register and recommend it to the National Register. It is a private religious site: look from the street.

About a quarter mile past the temple, the 1932 station in Mission and Spanish Revival style was designed by A. W. Heen and listed on the National Register on December 2, 1980. It is still Honolulu Fire Station 14. The March 2026 flood damaged it, and its crews were out for weeks before returning home in early April.

Exterior only, and keep clear of the apron in front of the bay doors: the engines still roll out of them.