The Re-bar Building Has Racked Up Nine Decades Of Ghosts

Re-bar certainly one of the city’s most historic extant nightclubs. In addition to being the venue Nirvana picked for their Nevermind release party—wherein the band got kicked out of their own show after sneaking a handle of Jack Daniel’s and then starting a cake fight—Re-Bar is home to the longest-running weekly house nights on the West Coast: the two-and-a-half-decade-old Seattle Poetry Slam, the birthplace of drag comedienne Dina Martina, as well as a safe space for generations of LGBTQ+ performers and patrons alike.

The building itself, located at 1114 Howell, is sort of an anomaly in that’s it’s historic in a way, not. It was built in 1930, so certainly, it’s old, but it’s single-story and not constructed particularly interestingly or well. Sitting at the foot of Capitol Hill, just a hair into the Cascade neighborhood, it’s a rectangular, reinforced-masonry structure—that probably does, appropriately, contain rebar—and has always been a bar or restaurant, replacing Pete’s Coffee Shop, an unassuming lunch counter that stood at Boren and Howell in the 1920s… read more >