New York’s West Village offers lesson for Kakaako

To be blunt, the apartment was a dump. The tilted floor was gritty, furry balls scurried from corners, dust filmed furniture surfaces.

The landlord apologized and had the place thoroughly cleaned, but the third-floor walkup with 32 stairs, each slanting its own way, dingy curtains on kitchen cabinets that persistently fell off their rods and a discomforting all-around weirdness challenged the description of the place as “charming.”

None of this mattered because the subway station two blocks away and businesses just steps away that provided for every want and need made the apartment the perfect base for re-exploring New York.

Restaurants, diners, green grocers with fresh tofu, shops selling coffee, bagels, tea, cheese and real breads, drugstores, delis, butchers and, oddly, two macaron boutiques met consumer demands. Jazz clubs and other entertainment venues enlivened the night.

Sidewalks scrubbed clean, stores opened doors to swarms of people requiring a morning espresso at Amy’s. Firemen and NYPD’s finest crowded Faicco’s for massive Italian heroes, cheese heads deliberated choices from among the hundreds at Murray’s while well-dressed women browsed through the aisles of Avignone Chemicals, a tranquil cosmetics shop that also dispensed prescription drugs.

Pizza connoisseurs called across Joe’s counter for slices to be devoured across the street at Father Demo Square, one of the many public spaces where city dwellers sit for minutes or hours to take in the scene and talk, talk, talk.

The open spaces — some big like Washington Square, others small like Father Demo — give the tightly packed neighborhood breathing room, but it is the subway station where lines run through much of the city that is among the area’s top attributes. The convenience of public transportation allow residents and people from elsewhere to come and go without having to deal with the perils of parking.

The vibrant West Village community is what developers and landowners are likely hoping for in Kakaako.

The idea of a district where pedestrians and bicyclists have as much, if not more, consideration as automobiles was previewed Sunday on Cooke Street. Closed to cars, the “complete street” demonstration was paid for by Kamehameha Schools, the trust with ambitious plans for housing and commercial development in the area.

Murals of cyclists, vegetation and happy people on industrial buildings and warehouses, bulb-outs with potted shrubs and small trees, musical performances, a sidewalk cafe and seating under shade trees at the usually bare-bones Mother Waldron Park gave a fleeting taste of the work-live-play objective.

Though the atmosphere was engaging, whether Kakaako will achieve the ideal largely depends on government, developers and landowners.

The Hawaii Community Development Authority, the agency that directs development in the district, has proposed increasing density by allowing as many as three 700-foot towers and an undeclared number of 550-foot structures to be put up near two planned rail transit stations. The authority expects rail will mitigate traffic density that ordinarily goes with housing density, but the rail system, as currently designed, will not be expansive enough to coax people from their cars, or get them to their destinations easily.

Still, a neighborhood like the West Village could eventually evolve, one where buying tofu and a loaf of bread will require a short walk around the corner instead of a drive to a shopping mall, where parks and squares serve as places for hanging out and talking, where bike racks will take priority over parking lots and where foot traffic beats out the car. Wouldn’t that be nice?