Honolulu's Chinatown is home for arts

HONOLULU — Shedding its reputation for illegal gambling dens, prostitution and streets plagued by drug dealers, Honolulu's Chinatown has finally begun to emerge from its dark past.

Visit the neighborhood today and you'll find yourself swept up in the crowds buying and hawking piles of tropical fruits, fragrant flower lei and greens, and meats butchered before your eyes.

But take a closer look and you will witness a new development not as common to the nation's other Chinatowns: Bohemian nightlife, galleries, stylish stores and ever ritzier restaurants.

As night falls, the streets earlier filled with cooks and moms looking for fresh foods are repopulated with primped young people gathered at the entrances of nattily styled bars and patrons of the arts on their way to performances of modern dance or Japanese flute music.

And, if the bass lines from local clubs aren't too loud, the sounds of drums, electric guitars and an earnest singer might be heard wafting down from a second-story window.

Long concerned with the happiness of the sun-seeking mainlanders and Japanese jet-setters hosted in the hotels of Waikiki, Honolulu now has a fun neighborhood for young locals to call their own in Chinatown.

But it's also a great place for tourists to see a side of Hawaii that isn't buffed up and manicured just for visitors.

"It used to be a different place filled with this kind of rugged potential that was kind of fraught with drug dealers and — it had a really, really bad reputation," said Rich Richardson, creative director of the ARTS at Marks Garage.

Founded with seed money from the city in 2001, the gallery was among the innovators in the eastern half of Chinatown, which had languished despite the buzzing ethnic commerce a few blocks to the west.

About two years later, Richardson installed two shows for his and another gallery and coordinated a nighttime opening in hopes of luring an audience with a fun evening out.

Initially, however, the plan didn't deliver.

"We had about 30 people here and six of them were from my family. So, it was a pretty small turnout. I was really skeptical. But it kept growing and growing," he said.