Merchant Street Historic District
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Judd Building, built 1898 (photo taken 2009)
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Location | Roughly along Merchant St. from Nuuanu Ave. to Fort St., Honolulu, Hawaii |
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Coordinates | 21°18′33″N 157°51′47″W / 21.30917°N 157.86306°WCoordinates: 21°18′33″N 157°51′47″W / 21.30917°N 157.86306°W |
Area | 7 acres (2.8 ha) |
Built | 1850s to 1930s |
Architect | Various |
Architectural style | Varied |
NRHP Reference # | 73000661 |
Added to NRHP | June 19, 1973 |
The Merchant Street Historic District in Honolulu, Hawaii, was the city's earliest commercial center.
Bounded roughly by Fort Street at the southeast end and Nuʻuanu Avenue at the northwest, its older, low-rise, brick and stone buildings, surrounded by contemporary, concrete high rises, serves as an open-air, human-scale architectural museum of the city's commercial development between the 1850s and the 1930s. Its architectural styles range from nondescript 19th-century commercial through Richardsonian Romanesque, Italianate, and Mission Revival. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Directly to the north is Chinatown, another historic district.
The earliest structure is Melchers Building at 51 Merchant Street, built in 1854 for the retail firm of Melchers and Reiner. Its original coral stone walls are no longer visible under its layers of stucco and paint, and it now houses city government offices, not private businesses.
The Kamehameha V Post Office at the corner of Merchant and Bethel Streets was the first building in Hawaiʻi to be constructed entirely of precast concrete blocks reinforced with iron bars. It was built by J.G. Osborne in 1871 and the success of this new method was replicated on a much grander scale the next year in the royal palace, Aliʻiōlani Hale. The old post office building was separately added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
The Bishop Bank Building at 63 Merchant Street was the earliest of the Italianate (or Renaissance Revival) structures on the street, built in 1878 and designed by Thomas J. Baker (one of the architects of ʻIolani Palace). Its distinctive features include a corner entrance, arched windows and doors, fine masonry work, and brick pilasters below an ornamental cornice and parapet along the roofline, all of which are obscured to some extent by its current exterior of monotone white stucco. In 1925, Bishop Bank moved to much larger quarters along "Bankers Row" on Bishop Street, and later changed its name to First Hawaiian Bank, now one of the largest in the state.