I just found and scanned this slide taken by my mother. It was marked “Kahala School, March 1957.”
It looks very familiar. But it’s not what the school looks like now, and it’s hard to exactly figure out what buildings it shows, and how it compares to what’s there now.
To the far left, in the background, is what appears to be the school cafeteria still under construction. Click on the photo to view a larger version, and you can see the big ventilation fans on the roof of the new cafeteria building. It also shows that this photo is taken from a funny angle that adds to the difficulty in interpreting.
The lower photo is an aerial view of the school today taken from Google Earth.
In the aerial view, you can see that there are two walkways that run through the school from the side fronting Pahoa Avenue to the back. One runs right along the side of the cafeteria, so that’s not the one showing in the 1957 photo.
The walkway in the old photo has to be the one closest to Kilauea Avenue,showing the angle that the photo must be taken from.
I’m guessing that there must have originally been a small classroom building about where there’s now a parking lot on the Kilauea Avenue side of the school, to the right of that walkway in the photo.
I haven’t found any other photos or descriptions from this period to help test that theory.
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Ian,
I (re)discovered your site recently and have been reading with interest, especially your posts about old Kahala and Kaimuki. I, too was puzzled by this picture. In case you’re still stumped, I believe you somehow scanned the slide in reverse. If you look at it mirror-image, the building at the far left rear is actually the preschool at Pueo and Kilauea and the classroom building in front of it is one of the newer buildings that contained the rooms for the upper grades. The giveaway is the flagpole and the red bricks below the windows, which were used in only the two oldest buildings.
Yes, you’re exactly right! It took me a long time to reach that same conclusion.