Seattle Now & Then: Seattle’s First Chinatown

pdorpat

7 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: The Phoenix Hotel on Second Avenue, for the most part to the left of the darker power pole, and the Chin Gee Hee Building, behind it and facing Washington Street to the right, were both built quickly after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. (Courtesy: Museum of History and Industry.)

NOW: The Phoenix Hotel was destroyed with the 1928-29 Second Avenue Extension. The hotel was replaced with the new street’s intersection, while the surviving Chin Gee Hee Building, originally behind it, was reshaped for the new northeast corner of Washington Street and Second Avenue.

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.

**Kurt Armbruster’s snapshot of the “little gem.” Thanks Kurt.**

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

**Chinese labor contractor at his desk.**

**Seattle Times clip from Feb. 15, 1927 comparing Chin Gee Hee to the Great Northern Railroad’s Jim Hill.**

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.

The Phoenix Hotel on the right with the Chin Gee Hee building out-of-frame to the right., ca. 1912. Long ago we did a now-then feature using the above and blow photos. When we find it we will insert it.

**A clip from The Seattle Times for August 25, 1897.**

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.

A detail from the 1908 Baist Real Estate Map, still twenty years prior to work on the Second Avenue Extension. Our choice intends to feature at its top the intersection of Washington Street and Second Avenue with the Phoenix Hotel named at its northeast corner. And please not the green marked park at the top. We will show more of it below.

A detail of the same intersection (upper-left) from 1912. Later an owner of the bound Baist map drew through the detail the borders of the Second Avenue Extension, which cuts through the Fire Department Headquarters at the northwest corner of Main and Third Avenue. In the photograph that follows directly below the extension work is underway with a remodel of the building at the southwest corner of Main Street and Third Avenue. The doomed fire station is directly across Main Street, and behind and above it the transcendent Smith Tower inspects it all like an adolescent hall proctor. It’s fifteen years old.

Looking south on Second Avenue S. over Yesler Way and the Fortson Square park and trolley stop. The Phoenix Hotel can be found on the left. A feature clip about Fortson Square is include with the line of features placed at the bottom of this feature. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]

**Looking south on Second Ave. S. during an early Potlatch Parade. Note the Phoenix Hotel upper-left.**

Most likely too hard to read but still revealing of the early hopes for the Second Avenue Extension. The Seattle Times clip dates from Oct. 18, 1925. And far right is part of a clip on Ye Old Curiosity Shop founder Pop Standley’s curio-congested West Seattle home.

A detail from the city’s 1936 mapping aerial. The completed Second Ave extension leaves several sliced structures including the Chin Gee Hee Building. Can you find it? Note the Smith Tower, upper-left, and across Yesler Way from it the triangular park named for Fortson, a Spanish American War volunteer – a heroic one.

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

**A 1963 tax photo looking north over Main Street and the Second Ave. Extension to the shining southwest facade of the Chin Gee Hee Building.**

**The Central Business District with Chin Gee Hee near the center of this record from the Great Northern tower., ca. 1930. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]**

Rubble from the 1949 earthquake. The subject looks south on the Second Avenue Extension from its southwest corner with Yesler Way. The southwest facade of the Chin Gee Hee Building rises with its six windows above the damaged swept-back auto parked on the right.

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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**First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 9, 2003**

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**First appeared in the Times, Feb. 28, 1999.**

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**First appeared in The Times, March 14, 1999**

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**Evidence that Jean visited Pioneer Square and the Chief during our recent flurry.**

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