Seattle's Chinatown, International District: One Neighborhood, Many Nations
Near Woodinville, Washington
The neighborhood south of downtown Seattle is the only place in the continental United States where Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and African American communities all put down roots in the same blocks and built a shared neighborhood together. That distinction is not a marketing claim. It is the product of exclusion.
Chinese immigrants began arriving in lower Seattle in the eighteen sixties, drawn by railroad construction and the canneries of Puget Sound. The eighteen eighty-six anti-Chinese riots, during which a mob dragged hundreds of Chinese residents toward the waterfront at gunpoint, showed what life here could be. The community stayed anyway, concentrated in what became Chinatown.
Japanese immigrants arrived in the eighteen nineties, building a Japan Town along Yesler Way. Filipino workers, mostly employed in the fishing industry, arrived after nineteen ten. The Jackson Street regrade, carried out around nineteen oh seven, and the opening of Union Station in nineteen eleven brought new business to Asian entrepreneurs, and by the late nineteen twenties the modern International District was already taking shape.
World War Two broke it open. The forced removal of Japanese Americans in nineteen forty-two emptied whole blocks overnight. The community that returned after the war was smaller and never rebuilt to its pre-war size. The Chinese and Filipino residents who remained held the neighborhood together.
In nineteen fifty-one, Seattle's mayor formally proclaimed the area the International Center, a name chosen to honor the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and African American residents who had shaped it. The more recent designation, Chinatown-International District, tries to hold all of that history in a single phrase.
The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, on South King Street, is the only community-anchored museum of its kind in the United States. It is the best place to understand what happened in these few square blocks over the past hundred and sixty years.
