Chin Gee Hee Building
The historic Chin Gee Hee building is the “last remnant” of Seattle’s original Chinatown.[1]
Seattle’s original Chinatown sat near Mill Street and First Avenue but moved to Washington Street between Second and Third Avenues in the 1870s. In the 1920s, a public works project, the Second Avenue Extension, demolished most of the original Chinatown.[2]
Chin Gee Hee commissioned the building in 1890. Chin Gee Hee had left his native home in Guangdong province, China to take part in the California gold rush in 1862. After six years in California, Chin Gee Hee eventually made his way to Seattle and became one of the leading merchant contractors in the Pacific Northwest, helping to create an international market in labor that built much of the Northwest’s infrastructure, including railway lines, and powered mines, fisheries, and mills in Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Alaska. Upon his arrival in Seattle, Chin Gee Hee joined the Wah Chong & Co., a labor contracting and import business and Seattle’s first wholly Chinese-owned company. Chin Gee Hee left Wah Chong & Co. in the late 1880s and, upon completion, this building housed Chin Gee Hee’s own labor contracting and import business, the Quong Tuck Company.[3]
The building’s segmental arched openings and semi-circular arched openings on the second and third stories are typical of the “burnt district,” in other words the buildings that replaced those destroyed in the Great Fire of 1889. The third-floor balcony and stucco were later additions but common for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese community in Seattle.[4]
[1] Karen Link, “Chin Gee Hee Building Inventory Narrative,” in Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD), n.p. July 15, 2004, accessed August 16, 2016.
[2] Link, “Chin Gee Hee Building.”
[3] Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 17, 35-37; Link, “Chin Gee Hee Building.”
[4] Link, “Chin Gee Hee Building.”
Credits and Sources:
Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.
Chang, Kornel S. Pacific Connection: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Kindle edition.
Link, Karen. “Chin Gee Hee Building Inventory Narrative.” In Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD). July 15, 2004. Accessed August 16, 2016.
