Kapaʻa Main Street

Old Kapaʻa Town was born from the people who walked away from the fields. While most towns on Kauaʻi grew up around sugar mills, Kapaʻa is one of only two on the island that sprang up independent of sugar. It was founded by immigrant sugar workers, mostly Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Filipino families, who left their plantation camps and used their savings to open small private businesses along this stretch of road.

The Seto Building in front of you is one of the proudest examples. Built in 1929 by Ah Doi Seto, a Chinese immigrant who arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1888 to work the sugar plantations, it became Kauaʻi's first modern general food market, outfitted with the latest refrigeration of its era to offer fresh meat and produce in a way no one on the island had done before. Over the years it would be known as the Quality Market and later the Big Save Building. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979.

Just across the corner, the Bank of Hawaiʻi branch has been serving Kapaʻa since 1920. Hardware stores, fish markets, barbers, dry goods, photo studios, and corner cafes once lined this main street, anchoring a community that had built itself with very little help from the powers that ruled the rest of the island.