Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

Management boasted the house could be emptied in two minutes if fire broke out - a Titanic-grade claim, mercifully never tested in more than a century. The Moore Theatre, at 1932 2nd Avenue at Virginia Street, opened on 28 December 1907 and is the oldest operating theatre in Seattle. The origin is Gilded Age ambition: developer James A. Moore built the theatre and its adjoining hotel to catch visitors bound for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, hiring architect E. W. Houghton for a house whose plain exterior concealed onyx, marble, stained glass and mosaic floors - 2,436 seats, claimed third-largest in the country. The engineering was ahead of its time: the balcony was designed without vertical supports - gentle ramps replaced stairs to the second level - and opening night for the Yukon-themed operetta The Alaskan pushed the crowd near 3,000 with standing room. The bookings track the century: vaudeville, symphony and revivals gave way to rock; as the Moore Egyptian in the 1970s it hosted the first Seattle International Film Festival, and its fine acoustics kept it on the concert circuit - Pearl Jam's Even Flow video was famously shot here. The stewardship is nonprofit: Seattle Theatre Group - operator of the Paramount and Neptune - runs the roughly 1,800-seat house today with touring musicians, comedy and dance across the calendar, the historic interior largely intact. Practical notes: the theatre sits two blocks from Pike Place Market near Westlake light rail; the steep second balcony is the bargain with famously vertiginous views, the ground-floor bar is small so pre-show drinks favour Belltown's surrounding blocks, and the building's ghost-story tours surface seasonally through STG. The management lineage matters to theatre history: James Moore handed operations to John Cort, who parlayed the house into a national career as a New York impresario, and the attached Moore Hotel still operates beside the auditorium - the pair built together in 1907 as a single Second Avenue speculation that outlived every rival of its era.