
The Hilo Bayfront Beach Park is located on Hilo’s largest and most important beach, an iconic ¼ mile crescent of black sand that is fringed by vegetation.
The terrain of this park was extensively reshaped by both the 1946 and the 1960 monumental tsunamis that devastated the Hilo Bay Harbor and the existing shore front Japanese camps that resided there. It is now considered a well-known flood zone that cannot sustain any permanent structures and therefore lends itself more to waterfront recreational and cultural activities rather than to shoreline development. The current layout of the site has arisen more or less by happenstance and is not the most suitable arrangement in terms of function, equitability, or aesthetics so a proposed masterplan, created by Hawai`i County Department of Parks and Recreation and Ki Concepts, was created to address this lack of functionality and to improve the area. […]