The Seattle neighborhood the All-Star Game left behind

As the MLB All-Star Game festivities were underway last week, Chinatown International District advocate Matt Chan drove through the waterfront and Pioneer Square and said crowds were so thick it looked like Disneyland.

Yet as he got closer and closer to the CID, the foot traffic dwindled. 

“It was like a ghost town,” he said.

Chan said he talked with several business owners who said they got no benefit from the influx of tens of thousands of people who flocked to the stadium district next door to the predominantly Asian American neighborhood, although boosters claimed the week would bring $50 million in economic activity to the city.

The arrows that were placed on the ground to direct people to the stadium illustrated the problem. The arrows barely touched the CID at all, and “just directed you out of the neighborhood. There weren’t any arrows directing you to the neighborhood,” he said.

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am not exactly a sports fan. My idea of sports fandom is (barely) women’s basketball and competitive cooking shows.

In the lead-up to the All-Star Game, I rolled my eyes at the sudden ability to fix the perennially broken transit escalators; the city cleanup, accessibility and beautification efforts; and the newfound enthusiasm for removing encampments of people by the stadiums. Yet I am also a believer in not yucking other peoples’ yums. If people find joy in sports in a world that often has too little joy, have fun.

But as the game week progressed, I began to hear more and more from CID community members trying urgently to rally support for neighborhood businesses. A Facebook group to support the neighborhood began sharing posts lamenting the scarce foot traffic and featuring grassroots flyers with QR codes directing people to a map of CID businesses created by Intentionalist, an online guide created to support businesses owned by marginalized people. Volunteers began handing the flyers reading “Support Local, Support Small Business” to passersby.

Given the history of the neighborhood being repeatedly disrespected, encroached upon and threatened with displacement over decades, Chan said he was disappointed though not surprised by the lack of consideration for the community. 

As KING 5 reported last week, many businesses actually suffered from the All-Star Game, not benefited. The owner of Korean barbecue restaurant Baegopa, for example, said he staffed up and bought extra food in anticipation of crowds that never arrived and ended up having to throw food away. 

Laura Clise, the founder and CEO of Intentionalist, said in an email about the event: “There is a lot to celebrate when it comes to the hard work by so many to host the 2023 MLB All-Star festivities. At the same time, what I have heard from businesses in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District and Pioneer Square neighborhoods is that the anticipated traffic and revenue from MLB All-Star Week didn’t materialize. That is understandably frustrating given that small businesses who planned and staffed for the event had to bear the cost.”

Clise said more intervention is needed when planning future events to ensure that businesses like those in the CID share in the benefit of these events. To that end, Intentionalist is partnering with Major League Soccer for this week’s All-Star Game in the other Washington to create a “small-business pass” that can be used at over 25 D.C. businesses owned by women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people.

Chan would like to see an even greater investment in the neighborhood, such as the construction of a public recreation field that would allow a community massively burdened by the traffic and disruption of pro sports to actually play sports itself. There is currently no open green space in the neighborhood large enough for sports like baseball. Chan put this idea into a proposal he gave to the city to pass on to MLB, but he’s not sure if the league is even serious about such an investment.

In a statement, MLB wrote about its outreach efforts during the All-Star Week, “Major League Baseball collaborated with the Mariners, the City of Seattle and regional partners in an effort to include a diverse and inclusive representation of the city during MLB All-Star Week. We are proud that our events touched a variety of multicultural neighborhoods, and we are thankful of the support from Baseball fans across the Pacific Northwest.”

Another idea would be to have public programs in the CID during these big events. He said during the All-Star Game the streets were emptier than on a normal day, but during last week’s Wing Luke-sponsored JamFest they were hopping.

There will be many future opportunities for the city and promoters to ensure benefits — and not just burdens — come to the CID.

Taylor Swift is coming with her legion of Swifties to Seattle this weekend, and looking further down the road, the World Cup, one of the planet’s biggest sports events, is coming to the city in 2026.

But first, the city has to stop taking the CID for granted. 

“White dominant culture always uses the word ‘resilient.’ And resilient is just a polite, politically accepted way of saying, ‘We will dump on you.’ Because we’re not actually resilient out of nobility,” Chan said. “We’re having to be resilient because of the lack of attention by the government and in general by the people of Seattle. But we survive, we persist, right? There is true resilience in survival.”