Aloha|Oʻahu Market — Kekaulike Street at Six in the Morning

The market at King and Kekaulike has been trading since 1904, and the rhythm hasn't changed much: fishmongers laying out ahi and opakapaka on ice before dawn, butchers hanging char siu in the window, crates of long beans and ong choy stacked on the sidewalk because the stalls ran out of room decades ago. Kekaulike Street itself is closed to cars for a block, which is why it works on camera — it is a pedestrian corridor in a city built for driving.

Filming-location records for Aloha place Brian Gilcrest and Allison Ng's evening walk through this stretch of North King and Kekaulike, with more scenes logged a few doors down at 915 Kekaulike. Crowe was after a Honolulu that tourists don't photograph, and this is it: fluorescent light, wet concrete, Cantonese and Ilocano and Hawaiian Pidgin overlapping across three feet of counter.

Go early. By ten the fish is picked over and the crowd thins to lunch traffic. Buy a bag of lychee from the stall nearest the corner and eat it standing up, which is the only way anyone here eats anything.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.