The International Market Place Banyan

Don the Beachcomber ran his office out of this tree. In the 1950s the restaurateur Donn Beach had a workspace built up in the branches of the banyan at the centre of the International Market Place, and the tree has outlasted him and two versions of the shopping centre around it. How old it is depends on who you ask, and the gap is wide enough to notice. Hawaii Magazine and Wikipedia both settle for a century old. Honolulu Magazine tells a longer story: planted in the mid-1850s by the New Zealand entrepreneur Harry Macfarlane, on ground that later belonged to King Lunalilo, who died there in 1874, and after him to Queen Emma. That version makes it about 170. We have not picked a winner, so the honest answer is somewhere between 100 and 176 years, and it was standing here long before the market place opened around it in 1957. What is not in dispute is 2013. The whole place was demolished and rebuilt at a cost in the hundreds of millions, and the banyan stayed. The new open-air canopy was engineered to route its steel around the tree rather than take the tree out, and an arborist looks it over daily. That arborist, Steve Nimz, has been minding it since 1971. It is free to walk up to, in the open middle of the shops on Kalakaua Avenue.