Last fall, my wife and I went on vacation in Hawaii. We stayed at Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, but we did a bunch of driving and day-tripping (as much as you can do when any spot on the whole island is only about an hour away.) I wrote a little about that trip here.

On our last evening in Honolulu, we took a long walk to our last dinner, at a tonkatsu restaurant (tonkatsu is the fried cutlet, usually pork, you might see on the sidebar of a Japanese restaurant menu. In Honolulu, which has a lot of Japanese influence, there are restaurants that specialize in tonkatsu alone.)

On the walk there, with a canal on our left and high-rises on the right, we reached this intersection (The Texaco is not the point here, although it was interesting to see Texaco all over Hawaii—that brand is defunct in most or all of the mainland, though I remember it in my New Jersey hometown).

There are aspects of Honolulu that feel “foreign,” like an East Asian city rather than an American one. But it’s also very car-oriented, and has a lot of roadside postwar architecture, including a slew of famous “drive-in” neon-lit joints. It’s a neat city, with a lot of contrasts and a lot of fusion. Alongside the high-rises, for example, it’s also full of these low-slung, two-story structures with exterior corridors.

We stayed in a recent high-rise hotel by the beach, but I guess it would also be kind of neat to stay in one of these retro motels.

Except this is not a motel. It is actually a condo building, with, possibly, some units for rent, based on what I could find online. The build date, 1965, is pretty much what you’d expect for this type of building. Most of the ones we saw look similarly aged, so I don’t think they’re still building these, just as the hotel industry pretty much no longer builds them.

But I had never seen a residential building like this before. Some folks on Twitter said they’re also in Florida, so I guess they’re sort of a “coastal” style, and maybe the exterior corridor design has something to do with the climate.

And it isn’t just apartments that use this motel-type structure in Honolulu. I even spotted a public school where the classrooms had doors off an exterior hallway, just like this condo building!

Here are a couple more:

Have you ever seen this building type used for anything other than a motel? If so, where? I’m curious!

Related Reading:

Suite Life

Living in the Motel

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