<Begin Segment 4>

TI: I want to now kind of move on to the Kingdome and, because you mentioned earlier how there were all these plans to develop the Kingdome, they had checked out the land sort of just west of the International District, right there.

BS: Yeah.

TI: So, and there was resistance. You guys didn't want it there. So what, how did you try to stop it?

BS: At the groundbreaking ceremony the county built this stage, temporary stage, and all the elected officials and all the leaders of Seattle were invited to this big groundbreaking ceremony. And city council Lem Tui, he was there, and John Sato was there from our community, Don Chin, and then all the mayors from surrounding areas, mayors from all the cities in King County. And students from the University of Washington, the Asian students from the University of Washington and Broadway Community College at that time, Seattle Central, and a lot of the high school students, there was word around that, hey, there's gonna be a little demonstration at the groundbreaking, so all these Asian students came down. And the front of the stage were all the big shots, right, facing the stage, and in back of the stage were the activists. And speeches were going on, and the activists had painted up little signs, "Don't let the Dome doom Chinatown," "Hum bows not hot dogs." These signs were up, and we were chanting, we, "No stadium," "We will not be moved," all that kind of stuff. And we started throwing little mud balls. It was in November, October or November, and we started throwing little mud balls up to the stage to get the attention of the elected officials. And they wouldn't turn around, so the mud balls became a little bit, little bigger, and then boom and then the sheriff's, sheriff's deputies came down, hauled off a couple of students. And that was cool, then there was yelling and they're screaming and people were being hauled away. Next morning, front page, "Asian community opposes the multipurpose stadium that will be built, disruption at the groundbreaking." And we said, hey, this is cool, so once a week we would have some kind of a demonstration at that site.

One of the guys, Frank Irigon said, hey, there's gonna be a Boy Scout bicycle rally at that site, and some of us said, "Let's not pick on the Boy Scouts now, come on. Why don't we turn our attention, bring our, bring our elderly and we'll have, we'll march on HUD?" The Department of Housing and Urban Development had their offices on Second and Union, so we took the same people that were going to the stadium demonstrations, we took them down Jackson Street up Second Avenue to the HUD office and to demand that some of the new programs that HUD was, had initiated, that we in the International District would become one of the priorities for the senior housing that the federal government was offering. And so we actually occupied the HUD offices. There were two hundred, led by elderly residents. We walked very slowly up Second Avenue, and once we got there Ben Woo, myself, Norma Aziz, Peter Bacho, Frank Irigon, they only called in ten of us, and we met with the HUD officials, all white, all male, and didn't get very far. And so the word went down that we're not doin' too well, so the two hundred other people that were on the street came up, took over the whole HUD office, just, and I have a slide of that that I'll show you. And we made our point, got it in the press, got a nice little coverage about that. And one of the problems about that time was that Nixon put a freeze on all funding to new housing starts and to put a stop to a lot of programs. There was a freeze, was a government freeze on social service programs and housing programs, and so we had to wait that out. But we would go down to HUD every week and meet with staff, and they got used to us and it became a pretty good situation where, once the freeze would be lifted, the HUD promised us that if the mayor's office and the city would concur then the International District would be high on the priority of new funding. And so the freeze was lifted and we were able to get funds to build the International Terrace by the Seattle Housing Authority, Imperial House where Fuji Sushi is, that building, International House on Maynard and Weller. We worked with the developers to make sure that when they built that housing that our people were first in line. And it just so happened that some of the first people that we signed up for this new housing that would be opened up in the mid '70s were the residents of the Milwaukee Hotel. It was during this time that InterIm, we were trying to negotiate a sale with the owners of the Milwaukee Hotel, Jordan Wong and Don Louie, and their price was a little bit more than what we could afford, so we knew that at some point after occupying the Milwaukee Hotel for almost three, almost four years, that at some point we'd have to give it up because we didn't want to invest more money into a building that we would not eventually own. So we waited 'til these new apartments were being built using HUD money, and then when they were completed and the doors were opened we had our people from the Milwaukee signed up to move into the new apartments. So no one from the, from the Milwaukee Hotel was ever displaced, so that was sort of calculated to do that.

TI: That's a good story. Going back to the Kingdome and the demonstrations, were you able to get any mitigation? Eventually the Kingdome was built and it did impact the International District, but through your efforts or the efforts of others, did the county every do any mitigation for the International District?

BS: What the county did was, John Spellman was there, and the county hired a consultant, a woman by name of Diana Bower. And Diana was an architect, and in fact, she was the head planner that designed the Waterfront Park. Her and her husband helped design that. Anyway, she was a, sort of a Caucasian woman, do-gooder liberal, and she, her assignment was to work with the International District and Pioneer Square to find out how the county and the city could mitigate the problems that would be caused by traffic of the, of the Kingdome. And she started working with InterIm and started working with Pioneer people, Pioneer Square people, but she told me privately that the needs in the International District are a little bit more prominent, so she spent about seventy-five percent of her time with us and twenty-five percent in Pioneer Square 'cause she knew that in the International District we wanted to preserve the housing stock for the people who live there, the low income seniors, low income families, working families, where Pioneer Square, they were trying to rejuvenate that neighborhood to bring in more middle income, higher income people, right, and to preserve the shops there, the artists' lofts and the art galleries and the wine shops and T-shirt shops and all that kind of stuff. And in International District, she just saw a need for more attention because we wanted to build housing, we wanted to build a health clinic. So she wrote up twenty-one resolutions, working with the community, and the resolutions were written to help mitigate the traffic and the problems of the Kingdome. Seventeen of the twenty-one resolutions were passed by the city council, and that was to develop housing. The city would prioritize the International District as a recipient for funds for the federal government, through HUD, that a health center, funds for a health center be allocated, business revitalization funds, seventeen resolutions all supporting our International District redevelopment. And she was assigned to make sure that these resolutions were put in place, and so Diana worked very closely with us.

TI: And how did you feel about these kind of mitigations, the resolutions? Were they, were they acceptable to you? Did you feel pretty good about them?

BS: Most of the resolutions, when the radicals, when we first marched on city hall there was an organization put together by Al Sugiyama, Frankie Irigon, the Bacho brothers, a bunch of, bunch of activists, had an eight point program which included housing, health care and all that, and they marched, we all marched on, when we marched on John Spellman's office the eight demands were placed on his desk, and those eight demands were included in the seventeen resolutions passed by the city council. And I'd have to dig that out 'cause I forget each one of 'em, but Diana Bower took those resolutions as a marching order and so she worked very closely with InterIm. And this little old white lady, she became one of us, she was a sista, you know? Doug Chin, "She's a sista," and Diana loved that, and we got a lot of, we got a lot of the demands or the recommendations funded. And so that was the lever; we used the stadium as a lever to get some of the stuff accomplished, some of these resolutions accomplished. So I'd say that the stadium, you couldn't, we couldn't stop it, but once it was there it impacted, like on a Seahawks Sunday where most of the, lot of the families outside of the International District want to bring their kids and the families want to come in for a dim sum afternoon on a Sunday. When there was a Seahawk game all the parking spaces were taken up by stadium goers 'cause they would come earlier, so that was one of the impacts that we said, hey, the businesses aren't gonna benefit from people going to the stadium. It's a detriment, it's not a positive element. Our parking lot might do well, but people from the parking lot don't stop into the restaurants before they go into the stadium. There were a few restaurants that had deals, ticket deals, parking -- Four Seas, park here, have lunch, go to the stadium, come back, have drinks -- so they worked out some pretty good deals with their clients, but very few of the other restaurants were able to do that, or wanted to do that.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.