Tom Farrell spent one of the outage's earliest mornings carrying a server down twenty flights of a darkened stairwell. Farrell is an attorney with an office in the Topa Financial Center, the twin-tower complex where Bishop Street meets Nimitz Highway. On July 23, a chiller leak in the basement had taken out the building's electrical switchgear. No fire. No injuries. Just a building that stopped working, all at once, for reasons that had nothing to do with any single tenant.
If you eat lunch downtown, you already sense something is off along Bishop Street this summer. The ground floor at Topa has quietly been one of the neighborhood's most reliable lunch stretches for years. Bar Leather Apron, the James Beard Award-winning cocktail bar tucked onto the mezzanine, pours from Hawaii's largest whisky collection most Wednesday through Saturday nights. Flowers for You has run out of a retail bay there since 1987. In March, U-Kitchen Hawaiʻi opened a bento and musubi counter at 700 Bishop Street, right next to Komala Curry, giving the office crowd another fast, cheap weekday option. Four months later, that same counter sits behind the same darkened lobby as everyone else.
The businesses at Topa didn't disappear. The building around them did, and the difference matters more than it sounds like it should.
What Actually Broke
The outage started July 23 when an air-conditioning chiller leaked in the basement of the Bishop Street tower, sending water into the building's switchgear, the equipment that distributes power to both twenty-story towers. Building management told local reporters the damaged switchgear is one of the biggest obstacles to getting the lights back on, because replacement equipment of that scale isn't something sitting on a shelf in Honolulu. Hawaiian Electric crews spent the following days evaluating whether power from one tower's system could be rerouted through the other while a permanent fix gets sourced.
That single detail is the whole story. A mainland office building with a similar failure might have a replacement part trucked in within days. A downtown Honolulu tower has to wait on freight, and freight to an island runs on its own clock. Avalon Group, which owns the property, told tenants in late July that the Fort Street tower should reopen in about two weeks and the Bishop Street tower, where the actual leak occurred, in about a month. Star-Advertiser reporting the same week widened that window further, putting the full displacement at three to five weeks for roughly 100 businesses.
Scott Barley, who runs Furniture Plus Design out of a ground-floor space at Topa, put it plainly to a reporter: "It's impacting us, but we're limping along." He and his business partner spent about $10,000 on ten portable battery generators just to keep the showroom's computers and server running.
Two Weeks, a Month, Maybe Longer
Run the calendar forward from Avalon's own estimate, given in a statement dated July 28, and the math gets specific. Two weeks from that statement lands around August 11, a date already behind us by the time you're reading this. The Bishop Street tower's one-month estimate points to roughly August 28, still a week and a half out. The Star-Advertiser's wider three-to-five-week window, counted from the July 23 start of the outage itself, spans August 13 to August 27, which means today sits inside that window, past the earliest guess and short of the latest one.
Christine Camp, Avalon's president and CEO, has been giving tenants regular updates even when the news wasn't good. Several tenants told KITV that the updates, even the disappointing ones, have at least let them plan around the disruption instead of guessing at it. "This is a trying time for the tenants and we are trying our best to assist them while quickly working on engineering solutions for the building to reopen," Camp said in a statement.
Where the Ground Floor Went
The businesses that could relocate, did. Bar Leather Apron is working to reestablish itself on the ground floor of Davies Pacific Center, the neighboring office tower Avalon also owns. Orthosports Physical Therapy reopened inside Pickles at Forte, an indoor pickleball club in a former downtown Walmart building. Avalon set up a co-working hub at Davies with roughly 100 desks, 80 offices, and nine conference rooms at no charge, plus free printing through a Davies tenant called Professional Image.
Not everyone had that option. Jan Park, who has run Flowers for You out of the same Topa retail bay since 1987, described tossing out lei and fresh flowers the weekend the power went out, then returning days later just to clear out her potted plants. A flower shop can't run a walk-in cooler off a battery generator the way an office can run a laptop. That's the part of this story that doesn't have a tidy fix: some ground-floor tenants have square footage and refrigeration and foot traffic tied to one specific address, and a month without power is a month without a business.
Where the Lunch Crowd Actually Went
If you worked out of Topa in July, the practical question wasn't about switchgear. It was where to eat. A few blocks and a short walk cover most of it:
- Common Ground Coffee Shop at the AC Hotel Honolulu rolled out a new Food Fix menu in late July, with a breakfast burrito, weekly-rotating chia pudding and overnight oats, and a small lanai with free Wi-Fi that works fine for a laptop lunch.
- The Dotted Line, also inside the AC Hotel, has been serving the same downtown crowd chicken pot pie and other global-menu plates under executive chef Christopher Murakami.
- Seoul Kimbap and Onigiri Onibe, both fixtures further up Bishop Street, kept running through the outage since neither sits inside Topa.
- Giovedi and Senia, a few blocks toward Chinatown, cover the sit-down end for anyone stretching a lunch into an actual meal.
None of these openings happened because of the outage. They were already part of downtown's rotation. What changed is which one gets the overflow from a building that can't currently feed its own tenants.
The Rest of Downtown Kept Its Lights On
A few blocks north, the outage barely registers. First Friday, the monthly gallery walk that has run in Chinatown and Downtown for two decades, keeps its normal rhythm on the first Friday of each month, five to nine at night, with the Downtown Art Center, Capitol Modern, and a rotating list of galleries and bars staying open regardless of what's happening on Bishop Street. That's the other half of this story worth holding onto. One building's mechanical failure can shut down a hundred businesses and still not touch the neighborhood's actual character, because downtown Honolulu was never built around a single address. It's built around a grid of them.
That's worth remembering the next time the timeline on a repair estimate feels frustrating. The businesses that could move, did. The ones that couldn't are the exception, not the rule. And the street itself, the one with First Friday and Seoul Kimbap and a dozen other fixtures that never touched Topa's electrical system, never actually closed.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property in the neighborhood, or you're simply trying to figure out where your favorite bartender ended up, SoldBySong knows this stretch of downtown block by block. Expect better. Schedule your free market consultation.
