Eastern Hotel
According to a 1913 Seattle directory, two years after opening the Eastern hotel housed a low-income lodging house, a barber, the business of Kozo Koyama—a collection agent and Japanese interpreter—and the Maynard Theatre, one of Seattle’s first cinemas. The building was designed and constructed by David Dow in 1911 for the Wah Chong Company for $28,000.[1]
Wah Chong & Co. was a labor contracting and import business and Seattle’s first wholly Chinese-owned company. The company provided significant labor for the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway, which in 1882, employed 15,000 Chinese workers in Washington Territory alone.[2]
The Eastern Hotel later became a popular hostel for Filipino cannery workers and housed a series of Chinese and Japanese retail businesses. The Hotel building continues to provide low income housing to Seattle residents through the present day.[3]
[1] “Eastern Hotel Landmark Preservation Board Seattle Historic Building Data Sheet,” in Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD), December 4, 2007, accessed August 16, 2016.
[2] Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 35.
[3] Eastern Hotel”; Jessica Davis, “If These Walls Could Talk: Historic Buildings in the Heart of Seattle’s API Community,” International Examiner, July 7, 2011, accessed August 14, 2016, http://www.iexaminer.org/2011/07/walls-talk-historic-buildings-heart/.
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.
“Davis, Jessica. "If These Walls Could Talk: Historic Buildings in the Heart of Seattle’s API Community," International Examiner, July 7, 2011. Accessed August 14, 2016. http://www.iexaminer.org/2011/07/walls-talk-historic-buildings-heart/.
“Eastern Hotel Landmark Preservation Board Seattle Historic Building Data Sheet.” In Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD). December 4, 2007. Accessed August 16, 2016.
