A more than 50-year-old building next to Kahala Mall that includes a McDonald’s and a long-closed bowling alley is set to be torn down next month to make way for a new store for the fast-food chain and some smaller tenants.
The $2.4 million project is being done by McDonald’s on land leased from Kamehameha Schools and reconfigured for a new restaurant and about 10 roughly 1,000-square-foot retail spaces in a separate new building.
McDonald’s construction manager Michael Muyco told the Waialae-Kahala Neighborhood Board last week that the new restaurant should be open by November.
“It’s going to be a great addition to the community, I think,” he said after the board meeting.
Under the arrangement, McDonald’s is developing its store and the other retail spaces, which also will include three kiosks and an outdoor seating area. However, Kamehameha Schools will handle leasing for the other retail spaces.
The redevelopment will provide McDonald’s with a modern stand-alone restaurant closer to Kilauea Avenue, though the queue for cars in the drive-thru will be bigger to alleviate a long-standing situation in which vehicles sometimes back up onto Kilauea Avenue during peak demand.
The existing McDonald’s, which is already closed, had been connected to the old Waialae Bowl, which occupied most of the space in a building that was built in 1958 when an initial phase of what would become Kahala Mall next door was only a few years old.
Waialae Bowl closed in 2008 after the 50-year lease held by owner Frank Yamamoto ended. He said at the time that operating costs including lease rent had grown too high to sustain the business beyond the end of the lease term.
A Minnesota bowling center operator pursued a plan that same year to renovate and reopen the facility at a cost of $1.4 million, but gave up after two years of efforts that included planning and obtaining a liquor license but no lease agreement with Kamehameha Schools.
Muyco said removing the old building will create a more efficient layout for McDonald’s and more small tenant spaces on the
1.4-acre property. “The bowling alley is deceptively large,” he said.
The number of parking spaces will remain about the same at around 60. Four tenants, including L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, were displaced by the redevelopment work. A Kamehameha Schools spokesman said the trust offered the majority of these previous tenants the opportunity to return after the new spaces are built but that no formal agreements have been signed.
