Densho Digital Archive - Bob Santos Interview I (denshovh-sbob

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TI: So other changes during the war, now, during this period, when you go down to the International District, how had things changed when you go, when you went down there during the war, and how did it look different?

BS: We knew the Japanese businesses were boarded up. Higo, right? We lived, my dad lived in the NP Hotel on Sixth Avenue, between Jackson and Main, and we lived there. And all the businesses on Main Street were boarded up, and quite a few of the businesses on Jackson Street and even on King Street were boarded up, so you knew that the establishments that were boarded up were from the Japanese families. The ones that were open could've still been owned by Japanese families, but other neighbors and stuff kept, kept their businesses open. I remember the secondhand store, the Jewish guy -- Higo, that building, that family owned that building -- and the guy on the corner had the secondhand store, jewelry store, secondhand store. It was a Jewish man, took care of the building. And we found out later he collected the rents from the tenants on the second floor and it was in a bank account for the family that came back, and the keys were turned back over to the family. We had a few families, a few people like that that were really cool. They knew that they had to acquire the property 'til this, 'til the internment was over and then, and it was all done by handshake, the ones, the families that we knew. So that was different. You had a partial ghost town.

TI: And do you recall your father saying anything about -- so he lived in that neighborhood, some boarded up storefronts and things like that -- did your father have any comments about what was going on?

BS: No. He, some of his best non-Filipino friends were the grocers, the proprietors of the mom and pop stores were his closest friends, and when they left he was, he really felt it. He was devastated by his friends going. And him being Filipino and with his country being at war with Japan, he never brought it up. There was never anything said about the neighbors or the people from the community. It was like our neighbors left. Our friends left. It wasn't them or us, and it was because we grew, all grew up together and we were in that same area, era, and we knew that our kids, kids in their family wasn't part of the war machine. We just knew that. They were, like the Chinese kids, they weren't in the Chinese army either.

TI: In that neighborhood, so there are a lot of people, Japanese who used to live in that neighborhood, with them gone and with Seattle starting to boom because of the war effort and jobs, and housing was pretty scarce, who moved in during that time? When war was going on and Japanese were gone, who moved in to live in those spaces?

BS: Lot of African Americans, lot of the black families, more black families. Now, International District was a very mixed neighborhood. Remember, I don't know if you remember the, lot of the bars. Where Hing Hay Park is, that was Duke's II, a really loud black entrepreneurial bar. It was, always had the best jazz music, but it was loud, lot of fights goin' on. And above it were apartments where a lot of the Japanese, I think it was probably, the buildings were probably owned by Japanese then. And the Japanese families lived on the second floor above the establishments on Maynard and King, and when they left, the families left, those apartments were taken over by black families, as I remembered it. Some Filipino families, but black families.

TI: And so how did the neighborhood change? I mean, when you watched different groups coming in, did, like, different kind of stores appear, or what changes did you see?

BS: Well, during the war years you saw a lot more street activity going, the jazz clubs. And the reason, Seattle became a jazz hub during the war. It may have started even before the war, but during the war was really, it became a hot spot because of the black military army bases at Fort Lawton, Fort Lewis. They always came to Chinatown, to the International District. The navy ships that would come in, all the black servicemen would come there. So the black presence was really expanding then in the International District, and where a lot of the, where I remember a lot of Japanese businesses were taken over by a lot of, a lot more white businesses and a lot more black businesses. The Bishop Drugstore, Nick Nickerson and the dry cleaners, they were all Japanese businesses before and African Americans came in after they left for camp.