Wing Luke Museum and Historic Freeman Hotel

The Wing Luke Museum and Historic Freeman Hotel occupy the East Kong Yick Building at 719 S King St in the Chinatown-International District of Seattle, Washington. The building was constructed in 1910 by the Kong Yick Investment Company, a group of more than 170 Chinese immigrants who pooled their money to build a hotel and shops when discrimination and exclusion laws limited where they could live and work. Its upper floors, called the Freeman Hotel, housed single men who worked in canneries, laundries, railroads and restaurants, and the ground floor served as stores. After decades of decline the building was closed and then restored. The museum, named after Wing Luke, who in 1962 became the first Asian American elected to public office in the Pacific Northwest, moved into the East Kong Yick Building in 2008. The Historic Hotel tour, offered with admission, takes visitors upstairs to the preserved rooms, where the fixtures, furniture and personal belongings of former residents have been kept. Guides, who are often from the community, describe the hotel's lodgers, the family association rooms, the Japanese American community that shared the neighborhood and the 1942 incarceration of Japanese Americans. The museum's exhibitions are community-curated, meaning that neighborhood members help to choose the themes and objects, and the approach is thematic and personal rather than chronological. The building itself is a three-story brick structure with a plain commercial facade and an interior of wood and plaster, restored with new seismic upgrades while keeping its early features. The Wing Luke Museum preserves a collection of photographs, oral histories, textiles and documents of Asian Pacific American communities, and its programs include walking tours of the neighborhood, workshops and festivals. The museum is a good starting point for understanding why the Chinatown-International District developed as a place where Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Vietnamese communities lived together.