Rooms with a view of history

It will take some work. But if you can get past the boarded-up windows and the fallen plaster, if you are able to sidestep the cooing pigeons that roost here and the droppings they have left behind, this upstairs space — vacant for 60 years — has a rich story to tell about the settlement of Seattle's Chinatown International District.

A maze of undersized single rooms weaves the tales of cannery workers and other immigrant laborers who once lived here. A larger room with a gilded ceiling, wainscoting and a long wooden table hints at something grand.

"This used to be the club room," said Jimmy Mar, 88. "It was like a social club, a place for people to hang out."

Chinatown started here on South King Street in 1910, when 170 or so immigrants from southeast China, including Mar's father, pooled their money to construct twin brick buildings. They called the buildings "Kong Yick," which in Chinese loosely means "mutual benefit."

The Wing Luke Asian Museum wants to dust off grandmother's attic and breathe new life into one of the Kong Yick buildings — Kong Yick East — transforming it into a vastly expanded new home for the 36-year-old museum and, officials hope, elevating the museum from that of a regional attraction to an international one. The museum is close to purchasing the building from Mar and about 130 other shareholders of the Kong Yick Investment Co., almost all descendants of the original investors 93 years ago.

The Kong Yick building itself would become a museum artifact, immersing visitors in history by telling life stories where they unfolded generations ago.

"This is where people drove in stakes and said, 'This is home,' " said Ron Chew, museum executive director. "These buildings represent their claim to the city and the region."

If all goes as planned, a new museum would be christened in the fall of 2007. Its transformation would follow the model of a Manhattan museum that depicts tenement life within a once-forsaken tenement building. While the outer rooms of the Kong Yick building would be restored, the core would be gutted, providing the museum modern, multi-level exhibit space where stories of more recent Asian immigrants could be told.

Reflecting the district

While Kong Yick is most closely associated with Seattle's Chinese-American community, the museum doesn't want to let the Chinese-American story dominate. Wing Luke considers itself a reflection of the larger Chinatown International District, unique in the U.S. in that several different Asian and Pacific Islander communities have blended into a single neighborhood.

The museum has built its reputation and goodwill over the years as a pan-Asian museum — the only one in the country — that recognizes the art and history of 26 Asian and Pacific Islander cultures. Wing Luke must bank on the support of each of those communities if it is to raise an estimated $30 million over the next four years to complete the new museum.

One-third of the total is expected to come through individual donations, with the rest largely split between private foundation grants and public funding.

"The museum needs to be sensitive that the Asian-American community in Seattle is changing, and has been changing for years," said Fred Yee, a Chinese-American who has volunteered to translate old Kong Yick Investment documents for the museum.

"There's a delicate balance. There is nothing wrong with preserving a building where the history and traditions of Chinatown are rooted, but the museum and the Chinese-American community must be sincere in extending the welcome to all other Asian groups.

"A museum should be a living entity that reflects into the future because that future eventually becomes our history."

Building a community

Chinese settlers arrived in Seattle in the 1860s, drawn by the prospect of gold. But instead of striking it rich, they labored in mines, railroads, farms and canneries. Chinese workers were expelled two decades later when competition over jobs led to resentment and riots started.

Chinese immigrants slowly filtered back into town around the turn of the century and colonized an area along South Washington Street, between Second Avenue South and Fourth Avenue South. As their numbers grew, the immigrants sought to build a community similar to what Japanese immigrants had created around Sixth Avenue South and South Main Street. The Chinese looked toward tideflat land a few blocks south.

About 170 of them invested around $200 each to build the side-by-side Kong Yick buildings, four stories of brick and timber rising out of a slight grade between Seventh Avenue South and Eighth Avenue South. Chinatown grew up around the two buildings, which still are considered its core today.

Early street-level Kong Yick storefronts included a tea store, the local headquarters of the Chinese Nationalist Party, and Yick Fung & Co., an import-export store that Jimmy Mar's father opened in 1910 in the Kong Yick West building.

Upstairs in the east building, gambling houses operated as an illegal social outlet for the immigrant community. Laborers, many of them Chinese or Filipino, also lived upstairs in modest quarters with shared bathrooms.

A cardboard "Men" sign still is tacked to the wooden door of a restroom that hasn't had plumbing for several decades. Aluminum garbage cans with "Freeman Hotel, 719½ S. King St." painted on the sides are scattered throughout other rooms. The Freeman was the 155-room residential hotel operated by a Japanese family until World War II internment forced its closure in 1943.

The upper floors have been vacant ever since, while the street-level shops boast two restaurants — including the venerable King Cafe — an import grocer, a senior center and headquarters of two "family associations." In the olden days, when Chinese immigrants arrived in Seattle, those with the same surname would form an association to act as a surrogate family. The tradition endures.

In the west building, in the same storefront his father opened in 1910, Jimmy Mar still runs his import-export store, although today it is less a business and more a relic. Wing Luke plans to move it to Kong Yick East as an exhibit in the new museum.

Treasure chest of stories

Although the design of the proposed new museum is only conceptual at this point, the possibilities can be imagined within the abandoned rooms of Kong Yick East. The former club room could tell the story of Chinese family associations that met there. A restored apartment could relate the struggles of Filipino cannery workers who lived there. And the story of Japanese-American internment could be told through the experience of the operators of the Freeman Hotel.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, founded in 1988 at the site of an authentic tenement built in 1893 and abandoned in 1935, uses the same "immersion" approach to interpret the lives of former residents.

"The space emotionally ties visitors to the subject matter because they are not only observing how they lived, they are experiencing it, including the sights and the smells," said Jon West-Bey, education coordinator for the tenement museum, which goes so far as to pipe into one apartment the smell of a coal-burning stove.

Like Kong Yick's upper floors, the tenement was decrepit when the museum obtained the building. In one apartment, 22 layers of wallpaper were uncovered — providing a distinctive historical record.

"Taking over a building like that presents a conundrum," said Renee Epps, senior vice president of the tenement museum. "You must make it safe for the public without destroying the building's historic fabric. When a space remains untouched for so long, you have an incredible wealth of history at your fingertips."

Ready to expand

The museum in the Chinatown International District is named in memory of Wing Luke, a Chinese immigrant who rose to prominence in Seattle as an attorney, civil-rights activist and the first Asian American to hold elected office in the Pacific Northwest. Three years after his 1962 election to the City Council, Luke died in a plane crash while returning from a fishing trip. The museum was founded in 1967 and moved in 1987 to its current leased home, a converted auto garage on Seventh Avenue South.

Crammed into 7,000 square feet, the museum would expand to 59,000 square feet — 40,000 for exhibit space — by moving to Kong Yick East.

After 93 years, the shareholders are willing to sell.

"We feel the best use of the building is to retain the heritage of the original founders of Chinatown and help bring more understanding of the culture and original intent of the building," said Howard Dong, president of Kong Yick Investment.

Wing Luke's static exhibit, "One Song, Many Voices," is an example of the museum's conscious effort to aim a wide lens on the Asian-American experience. It recounts the immigration and settlement of 10 different ethnic groups — Cambodians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Laotians, Pacific Islanders, South Asians, Southeast Asian hill tribes and Vietnamese. "We consider our museum as a force in the community to facilitate those cross-ethnic relationships," Chew said.

Airyang Julia Park, a Korean American who has served on the Wing Luke board for 11½ years, said some members wanted a new building without the baggage that Kong Yick carries.

"I sense that there is a tension, not exactly from competition, but rather a desire to have an equal share in the project," she said. "I think it is something the museum can overcome. We don't want to emphasize divisiveness; we want to emphasize the cooperation between cultures — the pan-Asian nature that has made this neighborhood so interesting."

While Korean Americans have little foothold in Seattle's Chinatown International District, Park said she still can get excited about the history that Kong Yick can help tell.

"The story really is about Asians who overcame difficult times," she said. "To me, as a latecomer to the history, that is an inspiring story, common to us all."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com