Kalukalu at 1624

Stand here long enough, and the present begins to thin. Before this building became Kalukalu, it was Otsuka's Furniture, a name most longtime Kauaʻi residents know by heart. The Otsuka ʻohana (family) had been serving the island since 1935, when brothers Wallace and Jay Otsuka opened a Studebaker dealership and slowly grew it into the furniture and appliance business many local families furnished their homes from. The building itself went up in 1994 as their flagship Kapaʻa showroom. For nearly three decades, it anchored this stretch of north Kapaʻa, until the family consolidated to a new location in Lihuʻe and sold the property in 2022.

Go back further, and the storefronts disappear altogether. A century and a half ago, there was no highway at your back and no buildings down the road. Cane fields rolled toward the mountains. Directly across from where you're standing stood the smokestack of Kapaʻa's first sugar mill. Captain James Makee built it in 1877 with the personal backing of King Kalākaua. That same year, a group called the Hui Kawaihau (the Ice Water Society) arrived by steamer at the mouth of the Wailua River. They were courtiers and musicians from Kalākaua's inner circle who came to try their hand at growing cane in the uplands above town. The experiment was short-lived. By 1885, the mill had been dismantled and moved north to Kealia, but the town it seeded did not move with it. The workers, merchants, and families who had come to serve the mill stayed on, and from there, modern Kapaʻa was born.

Reach back further still, before contact and before cane, this whole coastal strip was a meeting of sand and marsh. Kalukalu grass grew wild in these wetlands. It was named in the ancient chants of Mōʻīkeha, the legendary navigator chief who chose Kapaʻa as his final home. The building today wears the oldest name this land has ever carried.