Seattle's Arctic Club is a showy venue, then and now

The Arctic Club building, and its most recent tenant the Arctic Club Hotel, is acclaimed for its colorful terra-cotta skin, including the wrapping band of walruses that from the third story look down on both Cherry Street and Third Avenue. The building was completed in the midteens when the reigning fashion for elegant tile coverings over steel-frame construction was most fortunate for Seattle architectural heritage.

Inside, the club had other elegant "secrets" for the members, most notably the "Dome Room" with natural lighting through its arching stained-glass ceiling and below it the club's large lobby.

By a coincidence of grand architectural spaces it is possible now to stand — in this week's "now" with Jean Sherrard — near the back (northeast corner) of the Arctic Club Hotel's large lobby and Polar Bear Bar and be very near where an unnamed photographer stood ca. 1900 to record from the stage the seating in the Seattle Theatre. Built on the same corner in 1892 it had a long life, for a theater, but as a fine sign of what a booming city Seattle was then, the Seattle Theatre and its long run of plays, vaudeville, minstrels and one-reel films was sacrificed in 1913 to build the new club house.

Both the theater and the club were parts of a kind of cultural fence — with banks, government buildings, hotels and upscale entertainments — that divided the new and ever-expanding retail district to the north from Old Town or Pioneer Place to the south, with the waterfront nearby. Now both visitors and regulars in what was once the financial district can sample the diverse energies of its neighbors in every direction.

"Washington Then and Now," by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, can be purchased through Tartu Publications at P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.