Imagine a time when Seattle’s South Jackson Street bustled with revelers walking up and down the sidewalk at two o’clock in the morning, ducking in and out of nightclubs between Fifth Avenue South and Fourteenth Avenue South. When limousines pulled up to the curb at the Black Elks Club and dropped off women in diamonds and furs, and up the street a man called Neversleep hawked newspapers all night in the front of the Black and Tan. When music rang out till dawn and bootleg liquor flowed as fast as a soldier’s pay. This was the rich after-hours jazz scene that peaked between 1937 and 1951 in the Jackson Street Jazz District, nurturing the early careers of Quincy Jones, Ray Charles and Ernestine Anderson.

The district bridged two strikingly diverse neighborhoods, the Chinatown-International District (CID) and the Central District (CD). Chinese, Japanese and Filipino communities shared the CID, as they do today, along with the more recent Vietnamese community of Little Saigon; Black residents lived in the CD, though Jewish and Italian families were there as well. Seattle’s Black newspaper, The Northwest Enterprise, acknowledged the district’s diversity in 1933, describing Jackson Street as a “poor man’s playground,” where “all races meet on common ground and rub elbows as equals.” Though that was somewhat idealistic — the district had been created, after all, by real estate covenants (“red lining”) that excluded people of color from other neighborhoods — the description captured the area’s joie de vivre. It was a place, indeed, where whites joined Black people, Asians and other immigrant communities in the pursuit of pleasure and joy.

It was a remarkable moment in Seattle history, a time when intersecting migrations created an exciting new world. It was a world that brought together an arts-loving entrepreneur named Charlie Louie, from Guangzhou, China, who opened the Chinese Garden restaurant, and the virtuoso Black pianist and clarinetist Oscar Holden, a descendant of Midwest freedmen and freedwomen, who played there. Also in the mix were white college students, among them, Jimmie Rowles, who sat at the foot of pianists like Holden and then went on to a career that included accompanying Billie Holiday. For decades, such cultural crossings repeated themselves along Jackson Street like an infectious riff.