(click to enlarge photos)

Public historian Kurt E. Armbruster, one of our sensitive explorers of Seattle’s cityscapes, recently sent me his snapshot of the Chin Gee Hee Building at the northeast corner of Washington Street and the Second Avenue Extension.  Kurt regards it as “a little gem” and, it seems, it is the last remaining piece of architecture to survive from Seattle’s First Chinatown, in the neighborhood of Washington Street and Second Avenue.  It was a community of the mostly single men who help build the region’s earliest railroads, labored as domestics and on the pick and shovel gangs that helped dig, for example, the canal between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.

Chin Gee Hee arrived in Seattle in the mid-1870s and soon prospered as a labor contractor, a merchant and a builder.  Partnering with Chin Chun Hock, another and even earlier Chinese contractor-merchant, Hee and Hock hired Seattle’s earliest resident architect, William E. Boone, to design two commercial buildings for them in Chinatown.  Although both were consumed by the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, they were quickly replaced by the two

grander three-story hotels featured in the featured photo at the top.  The greater part of Chin Chun Hock’s Phoenix Hotel is to the left of the darker power pole in the photo’s foreground, and the full front façade of the Chin Gee Hee Building, facing Washington Street, is to the right of the pole.  Boone styled both as orthodox Victorians.  It is claimed that Chin Gee Hee’s hotel was the first brick building completed following the ’89 fire, however, we may be permitted to show some reservation about this claim as we do many other “firsts” in local history.  The thirty-plus blocks of the business district was a cacophony of construction following the fire with the builders’ general racing urge to open first.

 

Judging from news coverage, the Phoenix was the seedier of the two hotels.  On August 11, 1905, the hotel’s manager W.A. Morris was charged with robbing one of its drunken guests of $45.00.  While the manager confessed his innocence, the police told the Seattle Times that “Morris conducts one of the worst dives in the city.”  Earlier that summer the police had made an opium raid on the Phoenix, noting that the hotel had “developed into a full-fledge opium den and in the last month a half-dozen smokers have been caught there.”  Meanwhile, also in 1905, the Phoenix’s neighbor, Chin Gee Hee, left Seattle to build a railroad in China.  He was subsequently awarded by the last emperor with the honor of a peacock feather and a retinue of servants and soldiers, presumably to help him guard the rails.    

THE SECOND AVENUE EXTENSION as seen from the SMITH TOWER.  Above before: March 14, 1928.  Below after: June 11, 1929.   The Phoenix Hotel at the former northeast corner of Second Avenue and Washington Street can still be seen (below the center) near the bottom of the 1928 photograph.  The Chin Gee Hee Building  is behind it, to the left.   In the 1929 photo below, the Phoenix has been sliced away and the southwest corner of the Chin Gee Hee clipped.

The Phoenix’s transgressions were fixed forever in 1928 when it was razed with the “improvement” of the Second Avenue Extension, a 1,413-foot cut through the neighborhood between Yesler Way and Jackson Street.  It was hoped that the extension would make Second Avenue a ceremonial promenade leading to and from the train depots. The Chin Gee Hee Building was saved with only its west end sliced away.  This eccentric reduction, combined with the recessed gallery cut into the third floor above Washington Street, surely heightened the building’s gem-like charms.   Martin Denny, the proprietor of the Assemblage, the Chin Gee Hee’s principal commercial tenant, shared the greater neighborhood’s underground mystery that the Phoenix Hotel’s basement may well survive under the intersection.

THREE OTHER GLIMPSES OF THE CHIN GEE HEE BUILDING

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s detail of the Chin Gee Hee Building, which Kurt adores:

Anything to add, les mecs?   Certainly Jean, first a long list of features pulled  by Ron Edge from the last eight years or so of Now-and-Then, and then a few more and earlier features.

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