Kaimuki

This guide to Kaimuki's hilltop park in Honolulu follows a modest rise that never stopped being repurposed: a mid-1800s semaphore signaling ships to a Merchant Street bank, a lookout King Kamehameha the First used to track canoes during his conquest of Oahu, and the source of the district's name, tied to a legend about the menehune roasting ti root here. You'll also hear how University of Hawaii astronomers climbed it in 1910 to watch Halley's Comet, and how soldiers later manned a bunker on the same ground during World War Two.