Pioneer Square

Henry Yesler arrived in the autumn of 1852 with sawmill machinery already bought and nowhere to put it. Every piece of the eastern shore of Elliott Bay was claimed. He announced he would build to the south, near the mouth of the Duwamish — and the settlers, understanding exactly what a mill was worth to them, offered to give up parts of their claims if he would build closer.

Carson Boren and Doc Maynard ceded a strip nearly five hundred feet wide between their two claims. Yesler put the mill at its western end, on the bay. The rest of the strip ran inland as a panhandle to the 320-acre Donation Land Claim he took for himself and his wife on what is now First Hill, and it was used to skid logs down from the hillsides. It was called Mill Street, then Skid Road, and finally Yesler Way.

Yesler Way began not as a conventionally planned street but as the seam between two claims, widened to attract industry. Every later plat and zoning map inherited that 1852 decision.

The spot Yesler chose was a small peninsula — an island at very high tides — between Maynard's claim and Boren's, with the bay to the west and a marshy tidal lagoon behind it.

The Duwamish and Suquamish called it the Little Crossing-Over Place, for a trail that started there and ran inland. It had held several large cedar longhouses. By the time the settlers arrived only the remains of one small hut were standing, though Duwamish and Suquamish families still lived along the shores nearby.

Seattle's first industry was therefore sited on former village ground. The fact appears in the same public history that celebrates the mill.

Yesler employed Native workers and was remembered among them for fairness. Thirty-three years later, as mayor, he joined Judge Thomas Burke in pressing for the removal of Chinese residents. Both belong in the same account.

Seattle had a cubic-air ordinance. It required every lodging to provide at least 512 cubic feet of air space for each person sleeping in it. It is an ordinary piece of nineteenth-century public-health law, of a kind most cities passed, and on its face it is about tuberculosis.

On the stormy night of Saturday 6 February 1886, an anti-Chinese meeting in the Bijou Theater — in the "lava beds," the red-light district between Yesler Way and Jackson Street — accused the Chinese of violating it. Most of the city's Chinese residents lived crowded, and most were therefore in breach. A "committee of fifteen" was appointed to inspect Chinatown the next morning.

No new law was needed. Selective enforcement turned an existing public-health standard into an eviction power overnight.

The episode is a warning about housing rules: even a neutral standard can become exclusionary when enforcement is aimed at a population with little power to comply or appeal.

At daybreak on 7 February, groups of men accompanied by Seattle police went house to house. Residents were questioned about cubic-air and nuisance rules; others carried their belongings into wagons and took people to Ocean Dock, where the steamer Queen of the Pacific waited. By early afternoon more than three hundred people were on the dock.

A writ of habeas corpus stopped the first sailing. The next morning Chief Justice Roger Greene asked each person whether they wished to leave. One hundred and ninety-six boarded before the captain declared the ship full, leaving at least a hundred people to return toward homes that had largely been dismantled.

A mob met them at 1st Avenue S. Home Guards fired, striking five people; Charles Stewart died the next morning. Martial law and federal troops followed. Another 110 Chinese residents were removed by steamer on 14 February. Only fifty to eighty remained in Seattle.

There were an estimated 950 Chinese in Seattle in 1885 — roughly a tenth of the city. It took twenty years for that population to return to its 1885 level. Over the same period the city's white population grew more than tenfold, to well over a hundred thousand.

Seattle's own historian, Clarence Bagley, writing about thirty years afterwards, recorded the recovery like this: "[by] early in 1887 our dark days and troublous times had disappeared as if by magic."

The apparent recovery depended on whose experience was counted. Many of the people most harmed were gone; those who benefited remained to record the city's revival.

The community rebuilt. By the early 1900s Chinatown was thriving again; later generations produced leaders including Wing Luke, the first Asian American elected to office in the Pacific Northwest, and Governor Gary Locke.

At about half past two on 6 June 1889 a pot of glue caught fire in Victor Clairmont's basement cabinet shop at Front Street — now 1st Avenue — and Madison. It ran unseen through basements and under the planked streets and sidewalks before it came up into the open. Volunteer firefighters drained the town's inadequate private water mains. By sunset some sixty-four acres were in ruins.

Nobody died.

Early reports blamed James McGough's paint shop upstairs. Fifteen days later the Post-Intelligencer printed a correction and an interview with John Back, who admitted throwing water on the overheated glue in Clairmont's shop.

The correction was then overlooked for almost a century, until historian James Warren restored Clairmont's shop as the point of origin in 1989. Even a corrected public record can preserve the wrong story when later writers repeat the first account.

The fire exposed an inadequate water system and volunteer department. Seattle created a paid fire department and rebuilt the commercial core in brick and stone. What now appears to be the city's oldest neighborhood is largely an 1889 rebuild on pre-fire lot lines.

Among the losses were African American businesses: an employment agency, a hotel, a restaurant, two barbershops, a boot and shoe maker, and a real-estate firm. One sentence in the fire record reveals a functioning Black commercial district whose individual stories remain largely absent from this account.

The steamship Portland docked at Schwabacher Wharf on 17 July 1897 carrying sixty-eight miners and, in the Post-Intelligencer's telegraphed phrase, a ton of gold. More than five thousand people met it, and every berth on the return voyage was booked by noon.

Seattle's gold rush was in outfitting: the city sold shovels, flour, boots, and passage, and Pioneer Square was the shop. The prosperity that followed helped finance the regrades described in the next room.

In October 1931, unemployed logger Jesse Jackson and twenty other men built shacks on former shipyard land south of Pioneer Square. The city condemned and burned the settlement; residents rebuilt. A new city government later allowed it to remain if residents managed safety and sanitation themselves.

In 1934 sociology student Donald Francis Roy counted 632 men and seven women living in 479 shacks across about nine acres. The settlement elected leaders, numbered its dwellings, registered voters, and included residents recorded across many racial and national groups at a time when much of Seattle was being sorted by covenant.

Hooverville lasted ten years. In 1941 it was demolished to clear land for wartime shipping.

By the 1960s the city had a plan to clear the district. What saved it was not a preservation ordinance but a group of people who wanted the buildings — a grass-roots movement led by the architects Ralph Anderson and Victor Steinbrueck, alongside Anderson's own purchase and remodelling of the Union Trust Building, which set the pattern for what followed.

In 1969 the neighborhood was nominated to the National Register; in 1970 it was listed and became Seattle's first preservation district.

Preservation kept the buildings standing and established a model used across Seattle. It also helped make the district more valuable, without securing a place for many of the low-income residents associated with Skid Road.

The buildings stayed. Many of the people did not.