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…