The Coliseum Theatre - 100 years ago

In downtown Seattle on the northeast corner of 5^th and Pike stands the Coliseum Theatre. Well sort of.  Today it’s a Banana Republic store: http://www.bananarepublic.com/products/seattle-wa-store-7664.jsp 

   

One hundred years ago when this majestic theater opened, the building looked a lot different. The city was also very different, as were American lifestyles. Seattle was growing at an alarming rate. In just twenty years, Seattle’s population had grown from 50,000 to over 250,000. The Klondike Gold Rush www.nps.gov/klgo/learn/goldrush.htm in the Yukon Territory turned Seattle into a boomtown almost overnight. The influx of money and opportunity brought all the cultural luxuries to which America’s major cities were accustomed. The Coliseum Theatre was part of Seattle’s leap into the Twentieth Century in the years leading up to the First World War.

The history of the Coliseum Theatre is as interesting as the architecture itself and you can read about it here:  http://www.historylink.org/File/2538.  My objective was to bring the original atmosphere back to life, by taking us back to a typical rainy Friday night in Seattle. Back when a night at the movies, in an era before TV, was a much grander experience than it is today.

30”x 40” acrylic/wax medium on canvas.