Manago Hotel

One of the last surviving early-twentieth-century hotels to have catered to business travelers, the Manago Hotel has made the transition into the vacation visitor age. The 110-foot-long building dominates its Mamalahoa Highway frontage. A corrugated-metal awning and simple cornice with a false front parapet maintain the horizontal thrust of the two-story building, while the still operational projecting neon sign beckons passing motorists. The hotel has a sand-painted shiplap facade, making it one of the last commercial buildings in Hawaii to bear this finish.

The interior, too, maintains its historic character. Inset double doors provide access to the lobby with its front desk, canec walls, and board-and-batten wainscot. A night en trance hall with six-inch tongue-and-groove walls runs parallel to the lobby and gives entrance to a front television room and a rear dining room. A pair of tri-fold doors allows these two rooms to be opened into one large space. A bar with its own double-door entrance from the street is on the other side of the lobby. Upstairs are twenty-two guest rooms; a three-story addition built in 1978 and connected to the main building by a covered walkway houses another forty-two units, with lanai offering views of the hotel's gardens and the ocean beyond. A Japanese garden adorned by pink flamingos graces the area between the two buildings.

Kinzo and Osame Manago established a hotel on this site in 1917, and constructed the present building in 1929. Harold Manago and his children and grandchildren now run the business.