Hanapepe Swinging Bridge Kauai Ceramic Art Tile
— the bridge the hurricane took and the town put back.
Not only on a wall.
“A wooden plank footbridge across the Hanapepe River on the west side of Kauai, where the highway sweeps past above and the old town keeps its own slower hours. Built early in the last century so taro farmers could cross to their patches; taken apart by Hurricane Iniki in 1992 and put back by the people who lived there. It still sways a little under footfall. Hanapepe means crushed bay. The town has the kind of stillness that small Friday-night gallery towns get right when no one is trying.
Hanapepe Swinging Bridge Kauai Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Hanapepe sits on the south-west coast of Kauai, on the leeward Kona side of the island, about twenty miles west of Lihue along Kaumualii Highway between Kalaheo and Waimea. The swinging bridge crosses the Hanapepe River in the centre of the old town, a few minutes' walk from the gallery row on Hanapepe Road. The river drains the Hanapepe Valley, one of the longest river valleys on Kauai, which cuts inland toward the Olokele canyon system above the Waimea Plateau. The name Hanapepe is Hawaiian for crushed bay, attributed to an old landslide along the coast. Two miles south, traditional Hawaiian salt-making continues at the Hanapepe Salt Ponds.
The bridge is a short wooden-plank footbridge suspended on steel cables across the Hanapepe River, free to cross and open through daylight hours. Originally built in the early twentieth century so taro farmers and residents on the west bank could reach the town centre, it was dismantled by Hurricane Iniki when the storm crossed Kauai on September 11, 1992 with sustained winds near 145 miles per hour. The community rebuilt the bridge by hand in the years after. It still sways noticeably underfoot, a small deliberate sway rather than a thrilling one. Access is from a short path behind the buildings along Hanapepe Road in the historic town centre; parking is on the road.
Hanapepe calls itself Kauai's biggest little town and runs on weekly rhythms rather than the resort-day clock that organises the rest of the island. The Friday Night Art Walk, held every Friday evening on Hanapepe Road since the mid-1990s, brings the galleries, the food trucks, and the talk-story crowd out for a few hours; for the rest of the week the town keeps the half-asleep pace of the sugar-mill years. The animators of Lilo and Stitch (2002) used Hanapepe as visual reference for the film's small Hawaiian town. The bridge belongs to that slower clock. Wooden planks, a steady creak, the brown river underneath, the highway humming overhead but never quite getting in.