Good Friday, April 1st, 1988. There is a wall of television monitors lining the front of the stage, in the shape of two crosses, each with two long crossbars and one short crossbar in between. I know it immediately as the Psychick Cross, the logo of the London based industrial band Psychic TV who have been commissioned to perform Stations ov Thee Cross, a video-deconstruction ov Easter, by the Center of Contemporary Art (COCA) at the Showbox Theater in downtown Seattle. Everyone I knew in the local art and music scene at the time was there and some I had yet to meet, including my future partner who was videotaping the performance for COCA. It was such an important performance that my friends and I still occasionally discuss it three decades on. This show was the first, but far from the last time, I walked through the doors of the Showbox Theater to have my life changed by music and art.
On July 24th, 2018 it was announced that the Vancouver B.C. developer Onni Group planned replace the Showbox building with a $100-million, 44 story apartment complex in a city already flooded with luxury apartments. The music community joined together with the City Council and the Historic Seattle organization to Save the Showbox. In a climate where unprotected historic creative spaces are demolished for high rises or repurposed, it was uncertain the battle could be won. Of the multitude of music venues from the 1980’s and 1990’s only the Showbox, the Crocodile, the Central Tavern survive as live music venues. El Corazon, which was historically called the Off Ramp and home to Pearl Jam’s first show, has been slated for demolition in 2019. The Harvard Exit movie theater maintained its landmark status when it was sold but is now an office and restaurant space. Consolidated Works, which comprised of two warehouses housing large scale art events and installations in South Lake Union has long ago been razed for Amazonian monuments to consumerism, speed, and greed.
The Showbox space was built in 1917 for Charles and Emma Frye (founders of the Frye Art Museum) to house the Central Public Market. In 1939 the Show Box, billed as the “Palace of the Pacific”, was born as a performance venue where Louis Armstrong, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peggy Lee, Guy Mitchell, the Mills Brothers, Al Jolson, Dizzy Gillespie, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Mae West graced the stage. The space has had many different lives, including a furniture showroom, a bingo hall, and comedy club. From 1980 to the present-day countless artists have performed there including Muddy Waters, James Brown, the Police, the Ramones, Dire Straits, The Fastbacks, Magazine, Pearl Jam, Erykah Badu, The Roots, Elvis Costello, Coldplay, Soundgarden, Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Paul Simon, Maroon 5, TV on the Radio, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Dave Matthews, and Macklemore.
The Showbox Theater was granted landmark status in July 2019, and while this is a huge victory, the fight to save the space as a music venue is not over. The landmark status protects the physical building, but not the use of the space, and it could end up filled with office spaces and a restaurant like the Harvard Exit, or worse. Historic Seattle and Save the Showbox are in the midst of fundraising to purchase the building to maintain the valuable place the Showbox Theater holds for the history and future of the Seattle music and arts community. It is imperative that the people of Seattle support Historic Seattle in the campaign to keep the Showbox part of the vibrant music community that Seattle is known for worldwide.
Historic creative spaces must be saved to allow future generations of artists to share in the experience of standing where other musicians have stood decades. I had the honor of being on stage once at the Showbox, as a board member of a local nonprofit music organization, and I could feel the stage alive with the energy of those who have performed there. Saving creative historic spaces in a rapidly changing city sends the message to artists and musicians that their expression matters, their community matters, that music and art have a place in the future, and that our city will not forget the past or what has made it great.