Kaka'ako's Street Art Continues After POW! WOW! Relocates

At the corner of Cooke Street and Pohukaina, a blue tiger stalks through painted jungle leaves on a warehouse wall, the kind of mural people stop mid-walk to photograph. A few blocks over, on the mauka side of the SALT parking garage, Kamea Hadar's rendering of the Hawaiian legend of Naupaka and Kaui stretches two stories tall. Near Lana Lane Studios, an anatomically precise dog by the artist Nychos shares an alley with a masked Charlie Brown from Jessica Serrano and fresh_bricks. Around the corner, a honu big enough to see from a moving car was painted by Hawaii Island artist Kai'ili Kaulukukui back in 2020.

Every visitor guide to this neighborhood credits these walls to the same source: the POW! WOW! Hawaii street art festival, founded here in 2010 by Jasper Wong and Kamea Hadar. That credit is accurate as history. It is no longer accurate as geography. The festival that helped establish Kaka'ako as an open-air gallery no longer paints here.

Where the Festival Actually Went

Jasper Wong's organization now operates under a different name, World Wide Walls, directed by Wong and Amy Wong. Its own description of the move is direct about the timeline: after spending nearly a decade painting the walls of Kaka'ako, the festival relocated to Kalihi, where it now works on community centers, schools, and museums rather than warehouse blocks. The annual event that once brought international artists to paint Kaka'ako's warehouse walls every February now takes place elsewhere.

If you've lived here more than a few years, you may already have registered this without naming it. The festival crowds thinned out. The February buzz around Lana Lane Studios quieted. Murals have continued to appear since the festival moved.

What's Still Getting Painted

Kaka'ako's murals were never solely a POW! WOW! product to begin with. Alongside the festival's contributions, walls here have also come from community collaborations with nonprofits like 808 Urban, plus commissions from private property owners and the City and County of Honolulu. As Kamehameha Schools continues its Kaiāulu 'O Kaka'ako Master Plan across the makai side of the district, more walls are expected to get the same treatment.

Walk Auahi, Cooke, and Keawe on any given week and you're seeing a rotating collection with no single curator.

The Gatherings That Keep Showing Up

The same pattern holds for Kaka'ako's recurring public events. Each has kept a consistent enough cadence that you can plan around it.

The farmers market is the most reliable of the three, running every Saturday morning without the seasonal gaps some of Oahu's other markets take. Kona Nui Nights has shifted days across different years, but it keeps returning to the same lawn at Victoria Ward Park Mauka for an evening of live Hawaiian music and hula. The Night Market is bigger and less frequent, closing streets around SALT for a few hours of food vendors, makers, and live performance.

The Reservation Everyone's After

The newest addition to Kaka'ako's food scene is Torishin, whose New York flagship held a Michelin star for seven years. It has opened in Honolulu as the city's only yakitori omakase, according to Honolulu Magazine's coverage. It joins a stretch of Kaka'ako dining that already includes Nori Bar's hand-roll counter and the newer steakhouse and tempura additions clustered around Ward.

The Warehouse Fight Nobody Outside Kaka'ako Is Watching

Not every recent development here is about art or food. A quieter dispute has been playing out over a World War II-era warehouse at 956 Kawaiahao Street, and it says something about how contested even the neighborhood's leftover industrial space has become.

According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the Hawaii Community Development Authority bought the roughly 6,880-square-foot warehouse and its adjacent lot in early 2025, intending to move the nonprofit Kupuna Shed, a bicycle repair and woodworking space formerly known as Honolulu Men's Shed Hawaii, into the space currently occupied by F45 Training Ala Moana. F45's existing lease, worth about $300,000 a year at fair market rent, is set to expire at the end of October. HCDA's plan drew pushback from board members and from F45's own stakeholders, and the agency's executive director reversed course twice before settling on a plan to eventually give Kupuna Shed ground-floor space in an affordable rental complex planned for the same property, once that complex gets built. The $5 million legislative appropriation behind the whole plan was earmarked in 2024 for a community facility for social programs in the district, without designating which organization would occupy it.

It's a small fight over a single warehouse, but it's a preview of a much larger one already underway a few blocks toward the water.

The Meeting That Just Happened on Kaka'ako Makai

On September 19, 2026, HCDA held a community workshop at the JABSOM conference facility to present alternative scenarios for the Kaka'ako Makai area plan, the roughly 30 acres of shoreline land that, as Hawaii News Now reported, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs has owned since accepting it in 2012 as partial settlement of unpaid Public Land Trust revenues. Previous proposals to build residential towers on that land died in the state legislature. The report described OHA's exploratory talks with the city over the former J.K.K. Look Laboratory site near the entrance to Kewalo Basin, weighing whether the space becomes a Native Hawaiian cultural center or the city's Ocean Safety headquarters.

In that report, State Sen. Sharon Moriwaki, who represents Kaka'ako, said the district sorely needs "a Native Hawaiian cultural center, with all the arts and the crafts and the history." OHA Board Vice Chair Keoni Souza described the current city talks as an attempt to "explore a shared vision" for the site. Nothing is decided yet. The next round of public input is what the September 19 workshop was for.

What This Adds Up To

Kaka'ako keeps building on its open-air gallery reputation. The festival that painted its most famous walls left for Kalihi in 2023, and the murals kept appearing. Walls here reflect contributions from nonprofits, property owners, and the city itself. The farmers market and the night events keep their own calendar. Even the fight over one small warehouse and the slower negotiation over 30 acres of shoreline remain subjects of public discussion. Together, these stories show several parts of the district changing at once.

Kaka'ako keeps writing its next chapter block by block, and if you own property in the middle of that, it's worth knowing what all this change has actually done to your home's value rather than relying on a citywide average. Hawaii LUX Team offers a free home valuation built around what's happening on your specific street.