Wah Mee - Todd Matthews

Wah Mee
Copyright © 2011 by Todd Matthews
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-615-53375-9
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America.
Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is
prohibited without the expressed written permission of the author.
Cover design by John Hubbard/EMKS, Finland
Copyediting and Proofreading by Carrie Wicks
First Edition, August 2011
Second Edition, October 2012
(new e-book cover, additional photographs, formatting changes)
wahmee.com
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ONE
If you want to know the whereabouts of the worst mass murder in the history of
Seattle, visit the city’s Chinatown and listen for the frantic squawks of exotic birds
from the pet store popular with the area’s children. Look for the old Chinese bakery
on South King Street, where pineapple buns, moon cakes, and sponge rolls are
arranged in neat, glistening rows behind a storefront window. Walk along South
King Street — past totems of pagoda-shaped pay phones and exhausted cooks
dressed in greasy chef whites smoking cigarettes during all-too-brief breaks and
surveying the neighborhood; through spacious Hing Hay Park, where seniors
practice Tai Chi most mornings — and turn down Maynard Alley South, where a
bright wind sock stretches high overhead, and seagulls caw at pigeons in a battle
over scraps in the garbage-strewn alley. Oddly enough, nestled among these
seemingly quaint and urban points of interest is the entrance to the Wah Mee Club
— a historic Chinatown gambling club, and site of a dark piece of Pacific Northwest
history.
The Wah Mee Club was tucked away in a ground-floor space of the Nelson,
Tagholm & Jensen Tenement, a hotel built in 1909 by three Scandinavian men who
fled the economic turmoil in their homeland and wound up in Seattle. The hotel,
with its 120 tiny rooms, was a hub for young men (and their prostitutes) en route
to Alaska to seek their fortunes in the Gold Rush.
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For thirty years, between the 1920s and 1950, the Wah Mee was classy,
cinematically noir, and very popular. “The Wah Mee Club was famous in Seattle,”
writer Frank Chin observed. “You don’t speak with any real authority about Seattle
of the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s, if you can’t say when you first stepped into the electric,
smoky — Wah Mee.”
Indeed, the club thrived, as did most clubs in Chinatown and along nearby South
Jackson Street. Historian and writer Paul de Barros, in his book on Seattle’s
speakeasies, Jackson Street After Hours, writes, “Imagine a time when Seattle,
which now rolls up its streets at 10 o’clock, was full of people walking up and down
the sidewalk after midnight. When you could buy a newspaper at the corner of 14th
and Yesler from a man called Neversleep — at three in the morning. When
limousines pulled up to the 908 Club all night, disgorging celebrities and wealthy
women wearing diamonds and furs. When ‘Cabdaddy’ stood in front of the Rocking
Chair, ready to hail you a cab — that is, if he knew who you were.”
According to de Barros, the more popular bottle clubs in and around Chinatown
were the New Chinatown, Congo Club, Blue Rose, 411 Club, Ubangi, and the Wah
Mee. All were hot spots for dancing, music, gambling, and booze. Many of these
clubs dated back to the early 1920s. De Barros profiles many of these clubs in his
book.
The New Chinatown was located a few blocks from the Wah Mee, on Sixth
Avenue South and South Main Street. According to de Barros, the club attracted
and promoted much bootlegging. The outside featured a replica neon bowl with two
“chopsticks” poking out from the bowl. Frequented by sailors and prostitutes, the
New Chinatown was known as a place for the occasional brawl. Five bucks bought a
bottle of home brew and an evening of some of the best live music being played in
Seattle during the 1930s. Jazz music was indeed a hit at the New Chinatown; even
the club’s bouncer, a burly and morbidly obese guy named “Big Dave” Henderson,
sat down at the piano most nights.
In 1940, the Congo Club opened in Chinatown, at Maynard and Sixth Avenues.
In the front, the Congo Grill; tucked away past a swinging door, the actual club
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TODD MATTHEWS
itself — complete with a ballroom and a circular bar.
The Ubangi Club was a black-owned nightclub hosting some of the nation’s best
jazz performers. The Ubangi — located on the east side of the building where the
Wah Mee was housed — was a huge and beautiful cabaret, where Cab Calloway was
known to perform when in town. The state liquor control board occasionally
targeted the Ubangi. During raids, the club’s manager, Bruce Rowell, would sneak
through the “secret doors” and stairways in the building and exit in the alley near
the Wah Mee. “That’s how I got away from the Washington State liquor board, three
times,” Rowell told de Barros. “Heh-heh-heh! When they came in, I’d go to the
office, see, and say, ‘Let me get my overcoat.’ Then I’d zip down that little deal, you
know, near the floor, and Sheeoop! I’m downstairs in the basement. Next thing I
know, I’m coming out, go down to the Mar Hotel, get a room, take a bath, and go
to bed! They’re all up there lookin’ for me and I’m in the shower!”
Another Chinatown club — formally named the Hong Kong Chinese Society Club
— was located on Seventh Avenue South. Locals aptly nicknamed the club the
“Bucket of Blood” because it was a raucous joint where fights were common. It
earned its nickname after someone was murdered following a police raid.
In many of these Chinatown clubs, guests drank booze, listened to live jazz,
danced, sought prostitutes, and threw down their bets at illicit casinos and on the
daily lottery. The club scene during the 1930s was carefree. As jazzman Marshal
Royal told de Barros, “They were different type of people . . . in Seattle. You had a
lot of fun. They were nice, they were cordial. I’m not just speaking of black people.
I’m talking about the Chinese guys that owned the cab companies and things. They
were our buddies. Everybody was just in it for a family. Like the Mar boys, big-time
tong people out of Fresno, we had a ball. After we finished our job, they would have
a midnight picture at the Atlas Theatre, open all night long. You could go in there
and tell the owner what picture you wanted and he’d have it for you two or three
days later.”
The Wah Mee Club fit nicely into this festive environment.
In its earliest years, during the late 1920s, the Wah Mee Club was called the
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TODD MATTHEWS
Blue Heaven. As its name implied, it was a decadent place for dancing, drinking,
gambling, and partying. Its regulars had always been a “who’s who” of the Asian
American community. The late John Okada, a Japanese American writer who wrote
the novel No-No Boy, frequented the club. In his novel, Okada describes the
atmosphere inside gambling clubs throughout Seattle’s Chinatown:
Inside the door are the tables and the stacks of silver dollars and . . . no
one is smiling or laughing, for one does not do those things when the twenty
has dwindled to a five or the twenty is up to a hundred and the hunger has
been whetted into a mild frenzy by greed.
Okada based his novel’s key gambling club on the Wah Mee — a place he
frequented during the 1940s. In No-No Boy, the Wah Mee is renamed “Club
Oriental”; here is Okada’s description of the club:
Halfway down an alley, among the forlorn stairways and innumerable
trash cans, was the entrance to the Club Oriental. It was a bottle club,
supposedly for members only, but its membership consisted of an evergrowing clientele. Under the guise of a private, licensed club, it opened its
door to almost everyone and rang up hefty profits nightly. Up the corridor,
flanked on both sides by walls of glass brick, they approached the polished
mahogany door. Kenji poked the buzzer and, momentarily, the electric catch
buzzed in return. They stepped from the filthy alley and the cool night into
the Club Oriental with its soft, dim lights, its long curving bar, its deep
carpets, its intimate tables, and its small dance floor.
Another Wah Mee notable was restaurateur Ruby Chow, who would later become
a King County Council member. Chow was easy to recognize at the Wah Mee Club,
at barely five feet tall with a towering French roll. Writer Frank Chin rather
humorously described her trademark hairdo as “the well-gardened and cultivated
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TODD MATTHEWS
creation of hair that rises and rises in the shape of a huge popover over her head.
[It] is the largest French roll ever to survive wind and snow, rain and the rest of the
weather.”
During the 1930s, the Wah Mee was open to people of all races. That changed
somewhat a decade later, when Fay Chin and his friend Danny Woo were driving
across the Ballard Bridge en route to the Ballard Elk’s Club to inquire about
chartering an Elk’s Club in Chinatown. The two men instead decided to charter their
own club and Chin ran with the idea. He sold fifty-dollar shares all over Chinatown,
assumed the rent, paid a fee to the city, and took over the Wah Mee.
When Chin and Woo took over, Chinese entered the Wah Mee through an
entrance on South King Street; Caucasians and other races entered the club by way
of the alley. A red sign with the club’s name (in English and Chinese characters) in
neon once hung outside the alley-side entrance. A photograph by Elmer Ogawa, a
freelance photographer and journalist who documented much of Chinatown’s festive
street scene during the period, shows seven young Asian American men gathered
at the Wah Mee’s curvy bar. Everyone is smiling, a drink in front of each patron. A
pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes sits upright among an array of ashtrays. Ornamental
lanterns glow overhead. One young man wears a fedora, while a few others don
leather bomber jackets. At the end of the bar, a waiter dressed in a white suit and
black tie smiles with the customers.
One Wah Mee regular, Windsor Olson, had fond memories of the club. “Back in
the 1940s, my wife and I went to the Wah Mee,” Olson told me one evening not too
long ago. We were sitting in his red minivan, parked in the alley and listening to the
rain tap against the metal roof of the van. We stared through streaked windows at
the club’s dark entryway: two sturdy double doors covered in fresh graffiti and
laced closed with a heavy chain and a padlock.
Olson — an older, well-dressed man who was still dapper in his mid-seventies
and wore a pressed shirt, dark blazer, and slacks — was a retired private
investigator who had snooped around hotels, bottle clubs, and brothels since the
late 1940s. Over the years, he was hired to spy on crooks, keep tabs on unfaithful
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TODD MATTHEWS
husbands, and generally tail the city’s
undesirables. “I’ll tell you,” Olson
commented, earlier that evening, “I’ll bet I drilled a hole in the wall of every room
at the Edgewater Hotel at one time or another, for cameras and listening devices.”
When I met Olson, he had the clean presence of a distinguished gentleman who
had heard all of Seattle’s dirty secrets — twice — and walked away from them with
a sense of mild interest. Corrupt cops and speakeasies and brothels didn’t shock
Olson; rather, they helped shape Seattle’s history — as had the 1962 World’s Fair or
early Pioneer Square. “I remember,” Olson continued, “there was only one set of
security doors back then. Once someone buzzed you in, there was a three-foot
Buddha on a pedestal just inside the entrance.” He paused to chuckle. “That
Buddha’s belly had been rubbed so many times for good luck.”
There was, of course, gambling when Olson and his wife, Dorie, would visit the
club. “But that was upstairs,” Olson insisted. “Not out in the open on the lower
floor.” Indeed, one researcher reports the hotel rooms above the Wah Mee Club
were demolished around 1940 to make room for a large casino.
“There were bagmen at the Wah Mee,” Olson continued. He was referring to
police officers who looked the other way as long as they received a cut from club
owners. “When I went to the club, the bagman was a cop named Tommy Smith. He
was a drunk. One night, he comes into the Wah Mee, drunk as can be, and sits up
at the bar. For some reason or another, he draws his weapon and he’s so drunk and
clumsy, it flies across the floor of the club. The whole place is silent. That thing
could have gone off and killed someone! He was crazy!”
For Olson, though, the Wah Mee Club recalls dancing the night away with Dorie.
He was then a young private investigator, just back from the war, and I imagine him
swaggering into the place with his wife on his arm, a gun tucked safely away in his
holster, and feeling for all the world as if he was a larger, but lesser known, part of
Seattle.
It’s likely that Olson sidled up to the bar next to the parents of Seattle
photographer and journalist Ti Locke. On her blog, “Western Women,” Locke posted
a scanned, creased, black-and-white photograph of her Chinese parents and four of
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TODD MATTHEWS
their friends (one Chinese man, two Caucasian men, and a Caucasian woman)
gathered around a small, round table covered in cocktail napkins and highball
glasses. Locke’s parents and the woman are toasting the photographer. The group
is dressed impeccably: the men wear crisp suits and silk ties, handkerchiefs poking
out from the breast pockets on their blazers; one woman wears a white designer
hat similar to something worn during a day at the horse races; Locke’s mother has
pinned a corsage to the right breast of her blouse. On the wall behind this happy
group you can see the hand-painted belly, feet, and flowing robe of a Chinese
Buddha. “My parents and their friends regularly tied one on when we came to
Seattle — twice a year, to stock up on Chinese groceries,” writes Locke on her blog.
“They’d leave me in the Milwaukee Hotel and go drinking and gambling at the Wah
Mee Club. I was quite safe at the Milwaukee — the elders would check on me, leave
peppermint Life Savers under my pillow. My parents would roll back to the hotel at
dawn, giggling, smelling of cigarette smoke and booze. They’d check on me and
have a nightcap.”
Despite cooperation from “bagmen” cops, the Wah Mee experienced several
crackdowns over several decades. The club’s operators grew paranoid of its
members and began to lean more toward Chinese-only clientele who knew the
management. As the Wah Mee Club went underground, Caucasian people like Olson
were no longer welcome. Clubgoers, most of whom were semiaffluent restaurant
owners and businessmen and -women in Seattle’s Chinese American community,
danced to music played on a nickelodeon. It was a place where hardworking
Chinese Americans spent their off-hours drinking and sharing stories. And it was
undoubtedly a place where money changed hands. Lots of money. The Wah Mee
was host to some of the highest-stakes gambling in Seattle. Winners went home
with tens of thousands of dollars after a single night of gambling. Indeed, gambling
was so popular at one point that, according to Jerry F. Schimmel, an authority on
coin collecting and author of Chinese-American Tokens from the Pacific Coast, the
Wah Mee Club issued its own brass tokens for gamblers — a 39-millimeter-wide
gem with the club’s name written in raised Chinese characters. A coin collector in
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TODD MATTHEWS
California posted a photograph of two of these Wah Mee Club tokens. Both
appeared well worn and had cancellation punch marks and splotchy black stains.
Both coins were auctioned off in April 2011 for $58. And the Wing Luke Museum in
Seattle’s Chinatown includes two aluminum Wah Mee Club tokens in its collection of
artifacts.
The club was last raided in the early 1970s and then fell on hard times. Mark D.
Simpson, a Seattle architect whose great-grandfather, Otto John Nelson, was one of
the three original Scandinavian men to construct the building more than a century
ago, told me his grandmother, Minnie Nelson Harris, and her brother, William “Billie”
Nelson, sold the building to Paul Woo “in the early 1970s — but it might have been
earlier.” Simpson has fond memories of the building. “I have a bunch of artifacts
from the building, mostly related to gambling,” Simpson recalled. “I was under the
impression that my grandmother from time to time tried to clean things up and
kicked out the seedier folks, keeping some of the gambling stuff I now have. My
grandmother was rather embarrassed about the stuff going on in a building she
owned and managed, but was also proud that her father had built it, so she did not
talk about it in detail. I, on the other hand, would love to know more about it and
our family involvement in it.”
Despite changes in ownership, the Wah Mee Club never moved. What did change
was the name of the building that housed the club — from the “Nelson, Tagholm,
Jensen Tenement” to the “Hudson Hotel” to the “Louisa Hotel.” In the early 1980s,
the club’s space was leased by building owner Woo, who was a former president of
the Chong Wa Benevolent Association, for $350 a month to Don Mar. Mar rented the
space under a sublease to the Suey Sing Association, a fraternal group. At one
point, a group of four business owners each contributed $15,000 to remodel the
club. Most of the money was spent on security, not aesthetics. Up until the end of
the club’s run in 1983, it seemed to have restored its character as a high-stakes
gambling club — though, as one patron described it, the club was “comfortable, but
not opulent.” Indeed, the Wah Mee — which opened Thursday, Friday, and Saturday
evenings and stayed open until six in the morning — was one of Seattle’s best clubs
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TODD MATTHEWS
for high-stakes gambling in the early 1980s. Gamblers could wager up to $1,000 at
a time, and up to $10,000 moved through the club nightly; the house collected
5 percent. Entire paychecks were laid down in a single night.
From the outside, the club was unassuming and unobtrusive. If you didn’t know
it was there, you wouldn’t likely find the door by accident. Like most after-hours
gambling clubs in Chinatown, security at the Wah Mee was tight. Four rows of glass
bricks fronted the club entrance. Each glass brick was opaque except one — which
served as a peephole for a club guard to identify a guest and decide whether or not
to permit entrance. Admittance was limited strictly to members of the club and
membership consisted mostly of restaurant owners, restaurant workers, affluent
members of the Chinese community, and members of the Bing Kung Tong. Club
members had to be admitted past two steel doors before entering the gaming and
bar areas. The club’s office was equipped with a warning buzzer and a “panic bar”
that would set off an alarm. Once inside, the club was spacious, divided by a low
railing. A long, curved bar was on the north side of the room. The south part of the
room served as the gaming area, with four mah-jongg and Pai Gow tables.
In the eyes of some Chinatown residents, the Wah Mee Club of the early 1980s
was like a B-grade cocktail lounge. Its history in the neighborhood bestowed it
some level of respect, but it was also a dive. Its decor was functional, not flashy:
guests could lounge on old couches flanked by throw pillows, plastic detergent
drums served as trash cans, cheap plastic ashtrays sat on nearly every flat surface,
and a few photos were tacked to the walls (a map of mainland China, a framed
portrait of a racing horse, a Chinese lunar calendar).
Ruby Chow and John Okada were early members of the club. But in the early
1980s, the club’s clientele changed, though it still consisted of hardworking,
financially comfortable members of Seattle’s Asian community. There was John
Loui, a onetime restaurant owner who had recently sold the Golden Crown
restaurant and was looking to change careers and enter the import/export
business. And there were Moo Min Mar and his wife, Jean, who owned the
Kwangtung Country restaurant in Redmond. They were a wealthy couple,
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TODD MATTHEWS
philanthropists who were planning to build a school in their native Chinese village.
Chinn Lee Law owned a repair garage in Chinatown and was a regular at the Wah
Mee, even working sometimes as a dealer and security guard. Dewey Mar was
famous for having brought Chinese films to Seattle’s Chinatown, and he operated
the only such theater in the entire city.
The Wah Mee Club closed for good in 1983. The rows of opaque glass blocks that
front the entrance are now covered in a thick layer of dirt and grime — as well as
the cryptic tag names of a range of graffiti artists: AJAR, DEAMS, UH UH UH, BACE.
A large chunk of the club’s stucco facade has been gouged in two places,
presumably by the many delivery trucks that park in the alley having accidentally
backed into the front of the club. Decades passed without the building receiving a
fresh coat of paint: the facade, once painted a rich forest green, turned to a bruised
and weathered reptilian crust; the red trim that boldly framed the glass blocks,
heavy double doors, and lattice above the entrance faded to the pink color of dying
coral. Any other property in such a sorry state of decay would be deemed derelict
by neighbors and would draw the attention of city officials: Clean up your building
or else! The Wah Mee Club is different. It helps that the empty club is tucked
halfway down a narrow alley, out of sight. More than that, however, one horrific
event nearly thirty years ago ensures it goes unbothered. Indeed, outsiders who
visit Chinatown for dim sum or shopping at Uwajimaya pass the club without
caution or notice. Chinatown old-timers, however, can’t help but glance down
Maynard Alley as they shuffle along South King Street.
The building that once housed the Wah Mee Club remains active. A small
number of businesses lease retail space along the building’s South King Street,
South Seventh Street, and Maynard Alley South sides: Palace Decor and Gifts,
whose shiny gold Chinese fan taped to the store window draws your attention; Mon
Hei Chinese bakery; the Chinese Christian Mission Seattle Gospel Center Bookroom;
the Chinese Chamber of Commerce; Sea Garden Chinese restaurant; and the
mysteriously named Pacific International Corporation, whose shades seem to
always be drawn. Liem’s Aquarium and Bird Shop, located in the alley right next
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TODD MATTHEWS
door to the club, is still open for business. I once mailed a postcard to the Wah Mee
Club, 507-A Maynard Alley South, only to have it returned with a United States
Postal Service stamp reading “return to writer — address unknown.” No one has
lived in the two floors of rooms above the street-level storefronts since they were
condemned in the 1970s. Some windows are covered in plywood; other windows
are coated in filth. Rusty fire escapes appear brittle; they hang off the side of the
building like old bones. The City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and
Development shows the building, which is technically sited at 665 South King
Street, was “yellow-tagged” as hazardous after the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake.
Repairs were made to the parapets and six chimneys, and the issue was resolved.
Despite the century-old building’s sorry state, the King County Assessor valued it
at $1.89 million in 2010. Property tax bills, which average close to $20,000
annually, are mailed to Jack N. Woo (whose parents owned the Moon Temple
restaurant in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford for more than thirty years;
Woo’s father, Yuen Gam Woo, cofounded the Luck Ngi Musical Society, a Chinatown
hub for Cantonese Opera) of Transpacific Corporation to a post office box in
Bellevue, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. The club’s doors, padlocked for
nearly three decades, hang slightly ajar. One person was curious enough to tie a
rope to a camera, dangle it over the tops of the doors, snap a grainy photo inside
the club, and post it to Flickr.com. It’s a photo that reveals a tangle of red-vinyltopped barstools and overturned wooden chairs amassed in a messy pyre in front of
the curving bar. A wide, heavy table blocks the entrance.
A gambling tolerance policy kept the Wah Mee Club alive for years. When the
club officially closed, it was at the hands of three young men who left thirteen dead
bodies on the floor, and one lucky survivor to recount the horror.
For more information and to purchase the complete e-book, visit
wahmee.com.
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TODD MATTHEWS
Todd Matthews is a journalist who has worked for a variety of newspapers and
magazines in the Pacific Northwest.
As a freelance writer for Seattle magazine, he received third-place honors
(2007) from the Society of Professional Journalists for his feature article about the
University of Washington’s Innocence Project and its work in helping to exonerate a
Yakima man through DNA testing after he spent ten years in prison, and first-place
honors (2007) for his feature article about Seattle’s bike messengers.
As a freelance writer at Washington Law & Politics magazine, he received thirdplace honors (2001) from the Society of Professional Journalists for his prison
interview with Prison Legal News founder Paul Wright, and second-place honors
(2003) for his article about whistle-blowers in Washington State.
In 2007, he received the award for Outstanding Achievement in Media from the
Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation for his work
covering historic preservation in Tacoma for the Tacoma Daily Index, where he is
the editor.
His work has also appeared in All About Jazz, City Arts Tacoma, Earshot Jazz,
Homeland Security Today, Jazz Steps, Journal of the San Juans, LynnwoodMountlake Terrace Enterprise, Prison Legal News, Rain Taxi, Real Change, Seattle
Business Monthly, Tablet, Washington CEO, and Washington Free Press.
He is a graduate of the University of Washington and holds a bachelor’s degree
in communications.
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