The Golden Horseshoe, a drag bar where anyone could get up and perform, is now an art gallery. The Mocambo, where Seattle’s Imperial Court was founded, is long gone, replaced by an entrance to the subway station. The Garden of Allah, once a destination for queer soldiers returning from World War II, is now a women’s clothing store at the base of a giant office building. In general, highrises and parking lots have replaced all of Pioneer Square’s gay haunts. The Atlas Steam Bath and the Stage Door Tavern at Occidental Ave and South Washington Street were once vibrant meeting places, and are now just a place to leave your car. Today, it’s a parking garage, like many of the neighborhood’s queer destinations. There was The Spinning Wheel at Second and Union, which featured drag queens who sang live - this was in the days before pre-recorded music and lip syncs. Other queer watering holes proliferated nearby through the 1900s. These days, the building is home to the straight bar Stage Seattle. Opened in 1934, it would become the longest-operating gay bar in Seattle until it closed in 2015. Next door was the upstairs gay bar The Double Header - which state liquor inspectors, who had to approve all bar names, were too dense to realize was a sexual euphemism. Also known as "Madame Peabody's Dancing Academy for Young Ladies," for decades it was Seattle’s premiere queer nightlife spot. Sodomy legislation and a moral revival led to the shutdown of The People’s Theater in the early 1900s, but it was eventually replaced by The Casino, which for a time was the only place in town where same-sex couples could dance together. That marks the former site of The People’s Theater, a disreputable box house - basically a theater/brothel combo - where anything went.
But the hints remain, if you know where to look: On the side of a loan shop, you can see an awning with the words “CASINO DANCING” that’s been there for about a hundred years. Today, there’s barely any indication that the neighborhood was ever queer. Seattle went through waves of moral freedom and moral panic, but for most of the city’s post-colonizer history, gay life was centered around Second Avenue and S. Long before Capitol Hill became the home of rainbow crosswalks, and before Renton Hill was briefly Seattle’s gay destination in the 1970s, Pioneer Square (as the mudflats are now known) was where all the seedy, secret, same-sex action happened.
With Pride season upon us and businesses cautiously re-opening, now might be a nice time to spend some time in Seattle’s traditional gayborhood: The mudflats below the Deadline. The intersection of Second and Washington, where the queer action used to be, is to the left and just above Smith Tower in this photo.