Although baths are often thought of as a purely sexual space, they were also an important social space for gay men. While not the only gay bathhouse in Seattle, the South End was certainly the oldest. The baths became the South End Steam Baths in the early 1940s and served a gay clientele. It was reportedly also a place where liquor could be obtained during Prohibition. The hotel itself was popular with those on their way to Alaska for the Klondike Gold Rush. The baths are listed in the Polk City Directory as the Hotel Northern Turkish Baths as late as 1939. The Terry-Denny Building (109 First Avenue), built in 1891, housed the Northern Hotel on its upper floors and a steam bath in the basement. It was one of several underground spaces including The Casino. The South End Steam Baths was located at 118 ½ First Avenue in the Northern Hotel/Terry-Denny Building.
Sources: The Land at Our Feet: Preserving Pioneer Square’s Queer Landscape, Richard Dreitas.Queen City Comes Out: Exploring Seattle's Lesbian and Gay History created by The Northwest Lesbian & Gay History Museum Project.
OUR PLACE GAY BAR SEATTLE SERIES
The building that once housed the Mocambo Restaurant has been demolished, and falls within a series of spaces that served as a social space and hosted the meetings of early LGBTQ social and business groups which no longer exist. In addition to traditional educational efforts such as a newsletter, the Dorian Society had a speakers bureau to speak in Seattle public schools, appeared on radio programs, led tours of gay bars for a program called Urban Plunge, and hosted drag balls.
The Dorian Society was Seattle’s early homophile organization, as most gay groups were called during this era. The Queen City Business Guild, an organization of bar owners that would eventually become today’s Greater Seattle Business Association, as well as the United Ebony Council, a black gay male organization founded in 1975, and part of the Court of Seattle with its empresses and royalty, both used the Mocambo for early organizational meetings.Īnother important organization that met regularly at the Mocambo during the late 1960s was the Dorian Society. The Mocambo, open from 1951 to 1978, served a vital role as a meeting place for early gay organizations. There were no gay bars on Capitol Hill at that time.” And the group would just kind of go to the Mocambo, and what was very interesting was a lot of the group that I was going with would start at Spags, meet people later at the 6-11, then go to the Mocambo or go out to dinner but they’d all wind up back at Spags, because that was the closest bar to Capitol Hill.
recalled the routine: “It was a cocktail lounge, and what a lot of people would do is, they would drink earlier in the places like- One popular place was the 6-11 on 2nd Avenue because beer was 10 cents and at happy hour you could have a lot of beers. for $1.30.”īy the 1960s, the Mocambo was part of a social circuit as LGBTQ patrons navigated the neighborhood’s queer landscape. Jacques, Provencal and roast loin of pork, stuffed with prunes, etc. Bill Parkin, a dishwasher at the Mocambo, recounts that, “The Mo was a mixed crowd until 1955, when it became mostly gay - except for daytime, when office workers, courthouse workers, lawyers and judges came in for lunch…The menu was sophisticated Coquille St. The Mocambo Restaurant served as a restaurant and cocktail bar.