Ghosts and landmarks of Seattle

The stretch of Second Avenue between Virginia and Stewart is full of what short history Seattle boasts. The Moore Theatre downtown is the oldest theatre in Seattle; it celebrated its centennial last year. The theatre was, according to their website, partly responsible for the establishment of Second Avenue as the center of Seattle's Theatre district. Its architecture and decor (plain outside and lavish, almost baroque inside) was heralded as magnificent and offers insight as to the the trend of theatre building at the turn of last century.

My encounters with the Moore are infrequent; I show up annually. My high school puts on its spring musical at the Moore every year and a great number of my friends were either crew or musicians. They would tell stories of sneaking down into what used to be the speak-easy in the basement or finding a long forgotten program decades older than they in some back closet. One of my friends was shocked to discover that the explanation for the back staircase (which has a ridiculously creepy looking exit) to the balcony was that of segregation policies.

Incidentally, the building next door, the Josephinum, is also quite old, as far as Seattle goes, and is the only place left in Seattle where the Latin Mass is celebrated.

Seattle, in comparison to Berlin, is a very young city. Any "ghosts" we have are of the recently deceased. Our city is still populated with the soon-to-be-gone, what one might call the dying.