Seattle Self-Guided Green Book Tour
Take the Seattle Green Book Self-Guided Tour, developed by Black & Tan Hall!
This multimedia tour highlights Black-owned and Black-friendly businesses that operated along Seattle's Jackson Street corridor between the 1920s and the 1960s. This vibrant avenue included the famous Black & Tan Club and other clubs from Seattle's early jazz scene. Learn about local hotels, restaurants, clubs, and barbershops listed in the national Green Book guide for Black travelers and the entrepreneurs who established them, alongside historic preservation and restoration projects.
On this tour, you will learn about entrepreneurs who established local businesses and the communities which sustained them. Hear local artists reading stories of the jazz scene during Prohibition and beyond. App includes text and historical photographs and images of each tour stop. Browse and learn from home, or listen to the stories while you travel the tour route!
Seattle's Black & Tan Hall is a values-driven cultural hub sustaining a thriving and equitable economy through arts and cultural programming in Hillman City, Seattle. We are a neighborhood-based, multi-racial cooperative working to establish an anti-gentrification model that combats displacement, keeps dollars hyper local, and sustains good jobs. Our partnership preserves and shares the history of place, people and prosperity within Seattle.
Once building renovations are complete, we look forward to opening the doors to a restaurant, music venue, and cultural space at 5608 Rainier Avenue South, Seattle, Washington!
Press
South Seattle Emerald - Seattle Green Book Tour App Aims to Keep Local Black History Alive
"My understanding of the impact this tour could have on our communities is that we can, as People of Color, see our stories as important — and others who we share community with can do the same. When we see each other’s stories as important and finally understand the history behind who really built this city, we care about one another a little deeper, we hold each other a little tighter, and we then contribute to keeping that history alive. In doing this, we can be the Promised Land my grandmothers hoped for so long ago." - Troy Landrum Jr.
Seattle Times - New walking tour revisits Seattle sites from ‘Green Book,’ a segregation-era guide to safe harbor for Black Americans
"It was not a good time. We made good times. We were able to come together in that terrible era for Black people and have fun, eat food, listen to music, create. Legends were here in Seattle. It’s not something that needs to be recreated, it’s something we can return to." - Sadiqua Iman
KING5 Facing Race Series - 86-year-old book once helped Black travelers find safe spaces in Seattle
“ 'It goes back to continuing to share the story. It goes back to our people, talking to our kids about the history,' Stockard-McDaniel said. 'I started researching actual Green Books. I bought a couple online and actually found in the 1950 edition my great uncle owned a shop on Madison here in Seattle.'
"That business, the Stockard’s Barbershop, was listed as a safe place for Black people visiting Seattle. The building is long gone, but the principles it stood for still survive."
KOMO News - Seattle's 'Green Book Tour' revisits sites of Black-owned spaces during segregation era
“So many of these Green Book spots were functional–they were hotels and barbershops, but also opportunities for people to engage in a cultural experience based on self-expression, and dance and music." - Benjamin Hunter
Crosscut - New audio tour amplifies Seattle’s ‘Green Book’ history
"By all accounts, E. Russell “Noodles” Smith was something of a slippery character — but the bootlegger and gambler (who always hung on to a dime for a bowl of noodles at the end of the night) was also a real estate magnate and club owner who helped usher in Seattle’s jumping jazz scene in the 1920s and 1930s. As a successful African American businessman, Noodles operated two of the few hotels that would accommodate Black travelers — such as jazz greats Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, musicians whom Noodles would invite to play in his Jackson Street clubs late at night, after their formal gigs.
"I didn’t know any of these details before diving into the incredibly rich history included in Black & Tan Hall’s Green Book Self-Guided Tour. Now I can’t stop listening." - Brangien Davis
KING5 News - Free self-guided audio tour, new community center aim to highlight Seattle's Black history
"The Green Book really shows us that Black history, Asian history, and our Seattle history are all intertwined and it’s important we don’t forget the places and people who paved the way” - Karen Toering.