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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 23, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on May 26, 2024
We really don’t want to spar over the name of this Seattle tavern
By Clay Eals
What’s the timeworn, in-person setting for many a vigorous verbal fight? A place to expound, debate, plead, bicker and wrangle? Hint: The feuding can be fueled by a brew or two.
The answer, of course, is your friendly neighborhood watering hole. Sometimes, however, such jousting can become boisterous, rousing some to fisticuffs or far worse. So we at “Now & Then” suggest that one such establishment had the correct branding from the get-go.
It was the Don’t Argue Tavern.
Proof lies in our “Then” photo, taken a few years after Prohibition ended here and funded by the federal grant-funded King County assessor’s office. It’s a slightly blurry rendition, begging jest that the photographer must have imbibed at the saloon before lifting a camera. Actually, it’s an anomaly, rare among the seemingly countless crystal-clear images captured by the assessment project.
The Don’t Argue’s location was 228 Fifth Ave. N., a largely nondescript neighborhood north of downtown, full of post-Denny Regrade wood-frame structures that fell victim to the wrecking ball in the late 1950s when what we now know as Seattle Center launched itself as the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962.
The site’s early commercial days were innocent. A 1923 Seattle Times ad for a wholesale and retail fruit and vegetable stand at that address was touted as “one of the best locations in [the] city.” But after the tavern took hold, it made news mostly via police reports, combined with inevitable headline wordplay. (“No argument in the Don’t Argue tavern,” read a 1939 blurb reporting the jailing of three customers.)
Such hits dotted news columns for decades. In a January 1954 incident, two “big men over 50,” one armed with a long-barreled gun, locked Don’t Argue owner Grace Allie and her barmaid in a rear storage room at 7:40 a.m., ransacking the cash drawer and safe of $2,300. Eight months later, a “slow drinker” who entered at 7:30 a.m. and nursed beers until 2 p.m. pulled the identical caper, escaping with $700.
By the time the nearby Space Needle took shape, the Don’t Argue building had become dust, and the business moved a block north to diagonal Broad Street, enduring until 1967. Taking over its earlier plot in 1980 was a McDonalds, feasting on a constant stream of Seattle Center visitors until it closed March 31, 2022, to make way for a $50 million nine-floor lab-science building that today is nearly complete.
What to make of the evolution from veggie stand to tavern to fast-food giant to glass-boxed tower? Time and the development bulldozer have an easy answer: Don’t Argue.
WEB EXTRAS
Thanks to Aaron Breitbarth, Cynthia Brothers of Vanishing Seattle and Jade D’Addario digital projects librarian of the Seattle Room of Seattle Public Library for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals’ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you also will find an illustrated brochure and, in chronological order, 30 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column — plus a few just for fun.
