Chinatown-International District, Seattle

Seattle’s Chinatown-International District keeps everything worth stopping for within three blocks of its station: the ornamental gate over South King Street, the Grand Pavilion in Hing Hay Park, the preserved hotel floors inside the Wing Luke Museum, and Uwajimaya’s grocery hall and food court.

The Historic Chinatown Gate over South King Street

The arch at Fifth Avenue South took the neighborhood the better part of forty years to get built, and it went up in 2008: two tiers of green and orange tiled roofs on red columns, gold and blue panelwork across the beam, a red lantern hung at the center, and a car lane running underneath it like any other street. It is the only piece of this district you can see from the train platform, which is a block west.

Standing under it is free, and if you would rather have someone else do the explaining, a tours and activities platform lists a four-hour walk that starts in this district and works north through Pioneer Square, which suits a longer stop than the one this page is sized for.

The Grand Pavilion in Hing Hay Park

Taipei’s mayor paid for this out of his own pocket in the 1970s, had it designed and built in Taiwan, and sent a crew over to assemble it; it was finished in 1975 and it has been the middle of the park ever since. Red columns, upswept tiled roofs, benches underneath, and Smith Tower framed between the eaves if you stand in the right spot. The park itself doubled in size in a rebuild finished in 2018, which added a terraced red plaza, a performance space and a steel gateway cut with paper-cut patterns at the north end.

It costs nothing, there is usually a chess game going on the tables, and it is the obvious place to sit for twenty minutes.

The preserved hotel floors inside the Wing Luke Museum

The museum occupies the East Kong Yick Building on South King Street, put up in 1910 with money pooled by around 170 Chinese immigrants, and used for the next several decades as storefronts, family association halls and a working hotel for men who arrived with nowhere else to go. The upper floors were left as they were found, down to the wallpaper and the belongings, and the only way in is a guided tour, included with admission and running daily. Nobody is allowed up there alone.

It opens Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, with adult tickets from $17. Between May and October, general admission costs nothing on the first Thursday evening of the month, 5pm to 8pm. Those upper floors mean stairs in a 1910 building, and the tour moves as a group, which is a poor combination with a wheeled suitcase.

Uwajimaya’s grocery hall on Fifth Avenue South

At 600 Fifth Avenue South, a block from the station, Uwajimaya is a full-size Asian supermarket with a stone lantern outside the door and a food court running along one flank of it: rice bowls, ramen, bubble tea, a bakery, and counters that turn things around fast enough to fit a tight stop. Walking the aisles is free and takes twenty minutes if you let it.

The aisles are narrow and busy on a weekend afternoon, which is the other half of why leaving the bag somewhere first makes this district easier than it looks.

The airport train boards on the lower level of this station

Trains reach SeaTac/Airport Station in about 35 minutes from here at a flat $3 adult fare, running every 8 to 10 minutes through most of the day and stretching to 12 to 15 minutes early and late. The airport station is served from 5am to 1am Monday to Saturday and 6am to midnight on Sunday. As everywhere on this line, the slow part is the far end: about 1,200 feet of covered walkway crosses the parking garage between the platform and the terminal, so plan on an hour rather than 35 minutes.

With more than four hours free, this district is a short detour off the main downtown Seattle route, which runs north to Pike Place Market and the waterfront from three stops up the same line.