“The peace of Howell Street was broken,” reads the Times piece. In another Times crime report, this one from May 26, 1930, a man saw his staggering reflection in a plate-glass window of the building, and, annoyed by what he perceived to be another intoxicated person, kicked the window in. But he saw the stranger getting in a machine with two or three other fellows, and the desire to investigate faded.” He felt more like getting to the bottom of the thing then, he said. One, from June 17, 1928, recalls a time a Peter Comas, a cook at Pete’s, talked his way through an interaction with a burglar targeting Skagg’s Market next door, ultimately abandoning any delusions of being a hero: “Comas then bowed himself away from the stranger, and whistling cheerily to disguise his intent, returned to the coffee shop and procured a knife. The Times also recounts two early instances of debauchery at this address. In 1910, visiting French civil engineer Francois Duval died in his chair and was found by his landlady, Mrs. Costello had a daughter while living at this address. Vidal) was trying to sell resurrection plants for 15 cents.
Vidal, “a man with family in great need,” posted several desperate ads in the Seattle Times (then the Seattle Daily Times) looking for work with 1114 Howell as his listed address. 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.Ī boarding house also used to occupy this spot. It was built in 1930, so certainly, it’s old, but it’s single-story and not constructed particularly interestingly or well. The building itself, located at 1114 Howell, is sort of an anomaly in that’s it’s historic in a way, not. 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.
Re-Bar certainly one of the city’s most historic extant nightclubs.