A private investigator has brought a shuttered piece of Ewa Beach history back to life, reopening the old Silva Store on Ewa Beach Road as Lloyd's Silva Store, complete with shave ice, notary services, and a foosball table where video games might otherwise go. Jim “Jimbo” Lloyd, 53, hosted the grand opening on August 28, marking the return of a corner shop that served the neighborhood for nearly eight decades before it closed a few years ago.
Lloyd leased the property from the Silva family in June 2026, according to Hawaii News Now, which first reported on the store's revival. The Silva family still owns the land, and the station reports that Lloyd's goal is to turn the shop into a community hub and a safe space for children. The 2,400-square-foot building itself dates back even further than the store's founding, having been constructed in 1938, according to a Realtor.com listing detailing the property's history.
A Neighborhood Fixture Since the Plantation Era
Joseph Silva founded what became Silva's Grocery & Liquor in 1946, and the shop served as a vital community hub for nearly eight decades, per the station's report. Longtime resident Candy Lozano grew up visiting the store in the 1970s and told Hawaii News Now that residents came by nearly every day, often exchanging found Coke bottles for cash — a dime for the smaller ones, a quarter for the larger returns.
The store's roots trace back to a rural, plantation-era Ewa Beach, when it stood alongside just a handful of other original mom-and-pop corner shops, including Tanaka Store and Beach Corner, serving a community then dominated by plantation housing and military facilities, according to 7-Eleven Hawaii. Frank Silva ran the store as proprietor for more than 30 years before he died in Honolulu in May 1993 at age 66, according to records held by BYU Hawaii's Digital Collections.
A Detective's Vision for the Corner Store
Lloyd is a local private investigator, and the new shop also offers private detective and notary services alongside its shelves of ice, coffee, kendamas, and dollar shave ice. Becoming a licensed private detective in Hawaii is no small task: under Hawaii Revised Statutes Chapter 463, the state requires four years of full-time investigational experience, passing written and oral exams, clearing background checks, and posting a $5,000 surety bond, according to the Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.
Lloyd told Hawaii News Now he did not want the store to die, and that he envisions kids learning life lessons there and one day returning with their own children for the store's 100-year anniversary. That's part of why he chose a foosball table over video games for the shop's interior, he said.
Filling a Gap in a Car-Dependent Corner of West Oahu
The stretch of Ewa Beach Road where the store sits carries a Walk Score of just 46 out of 100, marking it as a car-dependent residential street removed from West Oahu's main commercial centers, according to Walk Score data cited by real estate site Oahu Lux Homes. That isolation underscores why a neighborhood corner store still matters here, even as small plantation-era markets have vanished across the islands due to rising rents, big-box competition, and family retirements — leaving places like Maui's Hanzawa's Variety Store as rare survivors, according to Hawaii Public Radio.
The revival also lands amid rapid change elsewhere in West Oahu, where a dual-branded Hyatt hotel campus opened near the Keone'ae Skyline rail station in May 2026, giving Ewa Beach its first major hotel complex, as Hoodline previously reported. Local gathering spaces have faced pressure too — in June 2026, the Kamahao Canoe Club faced eviction from its Hammer Point shoreline site after nearly 20 years of youth paddling programs there, Hoodline reported at the time.
Community Space Amid Rising Property Crime
Lloyd's push to make the store a safe space for children also comes as West Oahu grapples with elevated property crime. Hawaii's statewide property crime rate stood at 1,946.8 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2024, and Honolulu Police District 8, which covers West Oahu, recorded a 3.9% uptick in overall reported offenses between June and July 2026, according to a Hoodline report on burglaries in nearby Ewa Gentry.
For now, Lloyd's Silva Store is open for business on Ewa Beach Road, welcoming local vendors to showcase their goods alongside the shave ice and notary counter. Whether the shop makes it to its 100th anniversary remains to be seen, but for Lloyd, that milestone is the whole point of bringing it back.
