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

56 Part Onecents a customer. Riding the wave of Seattle’s boom andhis own savvy for what the public wanted, Pantages alsoopened the Lois Theatre, which ran stock theater and wasnamed for his wife, a violinist who always played the firstact whenever her husband opened a new house. In 1915Pantages dedicated his grandest Seattle theatre, againthe Pantages, at Third Avenue and University Street, onthe northeast corner where Plymouth CongregationalChurch earlier chose to build its second sanctuary afterthe “Great fire of 1889.”Considine and Pantages competed feverishly,stealing each other’s performers and running the sameshow concurrently, each trying to outdo the other. It allended when Considine’s mortgage was foreclosed in1915, the year his rival opened his namesake terra-cottalandmark.Pantages then picked up the parts of Considine’scircuit that he wanted. By 1920 his was the strongesttheater organization in the country. At his best Pantagesran about seventy houses, most of them on the WestCoast, including a six-theater chain in San Francisco.Many of his most lavish theatres—including the SeattlePantages—were designed by Seattle architect B. MarcusPriteca. The grand sum of these contracts helpedmake Priteca one of the greats in the history of theatrearchitecture.Eugene Elliott claims that Seattle’s theatersranked second only to New York’s by about 1905. Atabout this time, moving pictures were slowly makingtheir entrance, normally, as noted, being presentedbetween vaudeville acts. There were as yet few moviehouses. For highbrow entertainment one had to rely uponthe Moore Theatre and the Metropolitan—the latter hadbeen modeled upon the Doge’s Palace in Venice.Many of those who migrated from the East andMidwest brought their cultural aspirations with them. Thewomen who were wives of businessmen and professionalsoften had received musical training before arriving in thecity. Twenty such women gathered in early 1891 at thehome of Mrs. George Bacon to form the Ladies MusicalClub. Their purpose was to “stimulate the developmentPost-Intelligencer advertisement forthe April 1917 performance of theNew York Symphony Orchestra at theMoore Theatre.of musical activity in Seattle.” The club’s first musical director, Martha Blanka Churchill,had been a student of Franz Liszt. All active members had to be musicians and pass a clubaudition. By 1905 the club had grown to 95 active members and 217 associate members and