A cornerstone of Seattle's performing-arts scene, A Contemporary Theatre, universally known as ACT, has been staging professional drama in the city since its founding in 1965. Now housed in the beautifully restored Eagles Auditorium Building on Union Street downtown, the company specialises in contemporary plays and new work, and the move into its landmark home gave it one of the most distinctive theatre complexes in the Pacific Northwest. The building is unusual in housing several performance .....

Home to the University of Washington Huskies basketball and volleyball programmes, Alaska Airlines Arena at Hec Edmundson Pavilion is a historic college sports arena on the university's campus beside Lake Washington. Opened in 1927 and named for the long-serving athletics director and coach Clarence Hec Edmundson, the pavilion is one of the oldest continuously used venues of its kind in the United States and a landmark of Seattle college sport. The arena seats around ten thousand spectators and.....

Seattle's farm team plays in the basement. Barboza, under Neumos at 925 East Pike Street on Capitol Hill, opened in 2012 as the deliberate answer to a booking problem: an artist drawing 100 people looks lost in Neumos' 700-capacity room but packs a 200-capacity one, so the owners spent hundreds of thousands turning their unfinished basement into a proper club - real PA, real lights, low 2.5-foot stage, no barricade, no risers - built expressly for artist development. The formula has worked for .....

A flatbed truck, five bands and a dildo ring toss grew into Seattle's defining urban festival. The Capitol Hill Block Party began in 1997 when Jen Gapay of Thirsty Girl Productions, put off by the corporate crowds of Bumbershoot, corralled five bands and a handful of DJs onto a small stage on 10th Avenue between Pike and Union - thrift-store furniture for seating, Blamo the Drunken Surly Clown for atmosphere - drawing a couple hundred neighbours to party in the open street for free. The neighbou.....

Seattle spent 1.15 billion dollars digging a brand-new arena out of the ground beneath a roof it refused to move. Climate Pledge Arena at Seattle Center opened on 19 October 2021 with a Foo Fighters and Death Cab for Cutie benefit concert, three days before Coldplay played the official ribbon-cutting and four before the expansion Seattle Kraken skated their first NHL home game. The building it replaced had opened on 21 April 1962 as architect Paul Thiry's Washington State Pavilion for the Centur.....

Pearl Jam's first five shows happened in this room, back when the band was still called Mookie Blaylock and the club was called the Off Ramp. El Corazon at 109 Eastlake Avenue East in Seattle occupies a building that has housed a live music venue, dance hall or bar continuously since 1910, cycling through names - Au Go Go, the Eastlake East Cafe, Sub-Zero, the Off Ramp, Graceland - before promoter and heavy-music lifer Dana Sims opened it as El Corazon on 4 February 2005. The Off Ramp years mad.....

When Duncan Trussell cut the ribbon on 24 April 2025, Capitol Hill got the largest dedicated comedy venue in Seattle. Emerald City Comedy Club at 210 Broadway East is the expanded reincarnation of Comedy/Bar, the scrappy room that opened in the same building as the city emerged from lockdown and quickly built a loyal following - and a brush with national controversy that only sharpened its profile. The upgrade was dramatic. Facing a rent increase that its 100-seat room could not sustain, the cl.....

The last temporary building from the 1962 World's Fair stood here for forty years before Seattle finally replaced it with something built to stay. Fisher Pavilion, at 305 Harrison Street on the Seattle Center campus, opened in September 2002 on the site of the old Flag Pavilion - an 11.2-million-dollar hall designed by The Miller/Hull Partnership and dug 22 feet into a hillside so that its roof doubles as a public plaza. The design is quietly radical: rather than occupy the landscape, the build.....

One mayoral candidate ran on a promise to tear the rusting towers down; instead they became one of the most influential park designs of the twentieth century. Gas Works Park, at 2101 North Northlake Way on a promontory jutting into Lake Union, preserves the remnants of the last coal gasification plant in the United States - and turned a toxic industrial ruin into Seattle's most distinctive public space. The Seattle Gas Light Company plant manufactured the city's gas from 1906 to 1956, first fro.....

They call it the greatest setting in college football, and the claim is hard to argue: the open end of the horseshoe frames Lake Washington and the Cascades, and fans arrive for games by boat. Husky Stadium, at 3800 Montlake Boulevard NE on the University of Washington campus in Seattle, opened on 27 November 1920 and today seats 70,083 - the largest stadium in the Pacific Northwest. Students built it in a real sense: a plaque drive raised the seed money, and the 30,000-seat bowl was finished 1.....