63 Merchant St

The building at sixty-three Merchant Street is a structure of thick, load-bearing walls made from coral blocks cut from the Honolulu harbor reef. Finished in eighteen fifty-two, it served as the home of the Polynesian Insurance Company. While Honolulu suffered through a series of devastating downtown fires during the nineteenth century, these heavy coral walls remained intact. They survived the heat that leveled neighboring wooden shops, eventually earning the building the nickname the Fireproof Building.