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Now & Then Paul Dorpat

A Place To Play

When Turner Hall first opened in 1886 it was the second oversized structure built on what for nearly a century now has been a city green: City Hall Park. The new venue sat at the southwest corner of Jefferson Street and Fourth Avenue with its ornamented façade facing Jefferson. We see it here left-of-center.

When it appeared, Turner Hall was one of a handful of sizable Seattle stages, until the city's Great Fire of 1889 consumed the others. During the rebuilding of the business district and new theaters, it was consistently booked.

In his "A History of Variety: Vaudeville in Seattle," Eugene Clinton Elliott lists a few of the acts that reached its stage. Dr. Norris' Educated Dog Show appeared in 1889, and the following year Professor Gentry's Equine and Canine Paradox kept the mysterious animals coming. Minstrel shows were also regulars, like McCabe and Young's Colored Operative Minstrels, which in 1890 appeared at the hall in "The Flower Garden." In 1897 the hall's manager, E.B. Friend, tried a combination of vaudeville and legitimate theater, but as one local critic noted, "Attempting to run a Music Hall without beer was like running a ship without sea."

Turner Hall was somewhat hidden behind its greater neighbor, the County Courthouse (1882), which faced Third Avenue at its southeast corner with Jefferson. Here, far right, we see only one undistinguished back corner of the government building. After the city purchased it in 1890 for a city hall, it was popularly called the "Katzenjammer Kastle" as it increasingly resembled the haphazard architecture illustrated in the then-popular comic the "Katzenjammer Kids."

Like its civic neighbor, the theater was razed for the development of City Hall Park.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and is co-author of "Washington Then and Now."

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