Chinatown–International District

The National Park Service says Seattle’s first Chinese settlers arrived in the 1860s and 1870s to work in mills, fisheries, and railroads. The first Chinatown south of Pioneer Square burned in the Great Fire of 1889. After the Jackson Regrade finished in 1910, the community moved again, this time onto filled land at King Street. In 1910 Goon Dip’s Kong Yick Investment Company, 170 Chinese immigrant investors from Seattle and the wider Pacific Northwest, financed the East and West Kong Yick Buildings.

Japanese residents built Nihonmachi, Japantown, just north and east. NPS says 125 Japanese people lived in Seattle in 1890 and 6,127 by 1910. Filipinos established Manilatown around Maynard Avenue and King Street; by the 1930s more than 1,600 Filipinos lived in the district. After Executive Order 9066, Japantown residents were sent to the Puyallup Assembly Center and then to Minidoka.

In 1973 Seattle created the International Special Review District to protect the neighborhood’s Asian American character. NPS says the local district covers Chinatown, Japantown, Manilatown, and Little Saigon on both sides of Interstate 5. The National Register Seattle Chinatown Historic District sits inside it, roughly bounded by South Main Street, Fifth Avenue South, South Weller Street, and I-5. The sources below are the National Park Service place page and the City of Seattle district page.