Seattle: 1900-1920 -From Boomtown, Through Urban Turbulence ...

52 Part OneWhen the depression hit, most of these enterprises closed down, and their owners (men likeJohn Cort, John Considine, and George Beede) left for greener pastures. Cort, for instance,established a circuit of theaters along the Northern Pacific route but ended up losing them.Those Seattle theater operations that survived the financial crisis were done away with byreform legislation enacted during the decade. Cort and Considine returned on the heels ofthe Klondike gold rushers. Many independent houses sprang up at that time, only to almostimmediately go out of business.Only the legitimatetheaters, the Seattle Theaterand the Third Avenue Theater,survived to greet the theaterrevivalists and new arrivals.Keeping those theaters alive wasthe contract that their ownersheld with the New York bookingagency Klaw and Erlinger, butKlaw and Erlinger rarely sent itsbetter shows on the road. For thatreason, the theater owners had toVaudevillians posing in Alley.offer Seattle audiences stock performances, a more mediocre fare.Cort decided, while announcing his intention to bring respectable vaudeville andfamily entertainment to the city, to turn his Palm Garden Theater in the business districtnorth of the deadline into a box house. Cort survived the ensuing protest because of hispolitical control over the Third Ward. Upon completing the renovation, he renamed thetheater the Grand Opera House and proclaimed it to be the city’s “finest.” When thebuilding was damaged by fire in January 1917, the Town Crier claimed it was only one ofsuch structures “inviting disasters.”Street regrading forced closure of his Third Avenue Theater in 1907, but Cort soonmoved to a much grander venue when he became the manager of the new Moore Theater atSecond Avenue and Virginia Street. There he ran his classiest shows, relegating secondaryones to the Grand.After Cort leased the theaters along the Northern Pacific railroad route, heestablished a booking agency, the Northwest Theatrical Association, to contest Klaw andErlinger. By 1910 the association controlled about twelve hundred theaters that featuredone-night stands. Klawand Erlinger respondedby entering the Northwestin September of that yearand contracting with theMetropolitan Theater. TheMetropolitan was thenunder construction in theMetropolitan Tract, whichThe Moore Theatre