Tokiwa Hotel

According to influential pianist Julian Henson, who came from Portland to Seattle in 1932, musicians working in the district sometimes rented rooms for a dollar or two a week at the Tokiwa. Built in 1916, the Tokiwa Hotel was a single-room occupancy hotel with 72 rooms and six storefronts. Henson, who played around the corner from the Tokiwa Hotel at the 411 Club, recalled the neighborhood as a music mecca, as well as a friendly multicultural community where people looked out for each other.

 

“My dad was a bartender at the 411 Club, so he had a lot of friends,” recalled Henson. “I was on my own, but every once in a while, I’d go in there and he’d say, ‘Kid, you doing all right?’ And he’d hand me a ten. Hell, that’d pay my room rent for a month. It was a town-and-a-half, man. It had so much going for it. You could get drunk and lay down in the middle of the street all night long and nobody’d bother you! Nothing happening till after twelve o’clock, then it came alive! All night, people running from club to club. It was an after-hours circus.”