Ask a longtime Kaneohe resident about Windward Mall and you'll get some version of the same complaint: it's half empty, the good stores left, there's nothing to do there anymore. It's a fair read of a real trend. Two of the mall's anchor stores are gone for good. But the story residents tell themselves about a dying mall has quietly stopped matching what's actually happening on weekends in this town. The mall didn't take the neighborhood's social life down with it. That life just moved outside the building, and in a few cases, it never left the parking lot to begin with.
What Actually Left
The complaint has a real foundation. Sears closed its Windward Mall doors on April 30, 2019, after decades as one of the property's original anchors. Macy's, which started life as a Liberty House department store, shut down in 2023 and the empty structure was torn down in early 2024. For anyone who grew up doing back-to-school shopping at either store, that's not a small loss. Two full anchor spaces, gone within five years of each other.
That's the half of the story that gets repeated on every neighborhood Facebook group and Tripadvisor review. It's also only half the story.
What Actually Moved In
Target opened in the old Sears building in 2022, and Planet Fitness moved into the mall in September 2025, according to KITV Island News. Regal Cinemas, which has occupied the upper level since a 1998 remodel turned the former JCPenney space into Ross Dress for Less below and a multiplex above, retrofitted its auditoriums with upgraded seating that reviewers now cite as the one unprompted compliment the mall still earns.
None of that reads as exciting. A big-box retailer, a gym chain, a movie theater with better recliners. But it's also not the profile of a shopping center in collapse. It's a shopping center that stopped trying to be a destination and settled into being infrastructure: the place you go for a prescription refill, a workout, a movie on a Friday night. The 530,000-square-foot property, owned by Kamehameha Schools and managed by Jones Lang LaSalle, has been through this cycle before. A $23 million renovation in 2006 reshuffled tenants the same way this current wave has. Malls that serve a fixed geographic area don't die so much as they specialize, and Windward Mall has specialized into utility rather than experience.
The food side backs this up in a smaller way. Tanaka Ramen & Izakaya opened inside the mall recently, giving the food court a sit-down option that didn't exist a few years ago. It's not going to reverse the anchor losses, but it's evidence the property is still attracting operators, not just losing them.
The One Thing That Never Left
Here's what almost never comes up when people complain about the mall: the Plenty of Aloha Farmer's Market has run at Windward Mall for the past 15 years. While Sears and Macy's cycled through closure and demolition, the market kept showing up on its regular schedule the entire time. It's the single longest-running fixture on the property, older than the Target that replaced Sears and outlasting the Macy's building by over a decade before that building even came down.
If you're measuring the mall's health by department store logos, the story is decline. If you're measuring it by what actually draws a recurring weekly crowd, the farmer's market has been the steadier tenant the whole time.
Where Saturday Morning Actually Starts Now
The bigger shift isn't inside the mall at all. It's that Kaneohe's weekend mornings have increasingly moved onto the water. Captain Bruce's early morning sandbar tours out into Kaneohe Bay have become enough of a fixture that the operator specifically flagged bringing back its reef-safe and keiki-safe sunscreen for August tours, a small detail that only makes sense if the tours are running often enough and with enough families aboard to justify stocking it seasonally.
That's a version of Saturday morning that has nothing to do with retail. Twenty years ago, a mall anchored a town's weekend rhythm because there wasn't much competing for that first slot in the day. Now the competing draw is a boat out to a sandbar in the middle of the bay, and it's winning.
The Afternoon Option With a Flood-Control Origin Story
If mornings belong to the bay, a lot of Kaneohe afternoons belong to Hoomaluhia Botanical Garden on Luluku Road, and the reason it works as an everyday option rather than a special occasion is baked into how it was built. The 400-acre garden, the largest of the five Honolulu Botanical Gardens, was designed and constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and opened to the public in 1982 as a flood control basin for the town. The beauty was a byproduct. The job was drainage.
That history is why the garden functions less like a tourist attraction and more like a backyard. Admission and parking are free. It's open daily except Thursdays, Christmas, and New Year's Day. The garden runs a free preschool nature hour on the third Tuesday of each month, a recurring program built for people who live close enough to make a monthly habit of it, not for a one-time visitor checking a box on a Hawaii itinerary.
Evenings Got Booked Up Too
The part of the week that changed the most might be evenings. Palikū Theatre at Windward Community College has been hosting the traveling Candlelight concert series, and the pace has been steady rather than a one-off booking. Earlier this month the venue ran a Bruno Mars tribute, a neo-soul program covering Prince and Childish Gambino, and a Cantonese pop program, three separate shows in a single night. The series returns September 5 with a Joe Hisaishi tribute and another Bruno Mars date. That's a venue booking multiple ticketed nights a month, at a spot that, a few years ago, wasn't part of most residents' evening plans at all.
A few miles away, Kualoa Ranch is hosting a KualoaGrown Pop-Up at its Ranch House front lawn on August 28, adding a daytime market event to a property best known for movie-tour traffic rather than local commerce.
None of these individually would be a big deal. Together, they describe a town where the evening and weekend calendar has more going on than it did when the mall was the only game in town, even as that same mall lost two anchors.
What This Actually Adds Up To
The mistake in the "dying mall" narrative isn't factual. Sears really did close. Macy's really was demolished. The mistake is treating the mall as a stand-in for the neighborhood's overall vitality, the way it might have functioned in the 1990s when it was one of the only reasons to leave the house on a Saturday. That's no longer how weekends in Kaneohe get built. They get built around a sandbar tour in the morning, a farmer's market that's been running for a decade and a half, a botanical garden with a flood-control pedigree in the afternoon, and a ticketed concert or a ranch pop-up at night. The mall still matters. It's just doing a smaller, more practical job than it used to, and judging the whole town by whether Macy's is still standing misses where the actual weekend energy went.
If you're weighing a move within Windward Oahu, or you already live here and want someone who tracks these shifts as closely as the sandbar schedule, Chip Lewis keeps a close eye on what's actually changing in Kaneohe, block by block, season by season. Reach out any time to talk story about the neighborhood.