Your walk here crosses a neighborhood known at different times as Chinatown, Japantown, Little Saigon, and the International District — and still all of them at once. Chinese workers arrived in the 1860s and 1870s to build the transcontinental railroads and settle in West Coast cities. In 1886, a mob drove the entire Chinese population of Seattle — about 350 people — to the waterfront at gunpoint and attempted to force them onto a ship to San Francisco; federal troops were called in to stop the forced expulsion.
Japanese immigrants followed in the 1890s, establishing businesses, temples, and community institutions in the blocks around Jackson Street. Filipino workers came in the 1920s. After World War II, Vietnamese refugees arrived following the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Each wave built on the last, creating a neighborhood of layered cultures that share a common geography. Today the district's streets hold Vietnamese pho shops next to Chinese dim sum houses next to Japanese grocery stores next to Filipino bakeries — a density of Asian food culture unmatched outside of major coastal cities. Walk slowly and read the signs; almost every building here contains a generation of history.