UPDATE: Congrats to Sunset Hill Community Hall, which will receive Historic Seattle’s 2025 Community Advocacy Award at the organization’s annual Preservation Celebration on Sept. 25, 2025, at the Labour Temple downtown. For more info, click here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 19, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 22, 2025

For nearly a century, Sunset Hill clubhouse has built community

By Clay Eals

We all revere the concept of community, but how do we put it into practice? It boils down to joining forces for the common good — for desired improvements and mutual enjoyment. And as with many things, it can be as much about perception as reality.

In 1929, University of Washington master’s student Irene Somerville Durham documented Seattle’s then-108 community clubs, mostly in middle-class and working-class residential neighborhoods. She related the legend of two north-end gents repeatedly stumbling into puddles in the dark and failing to persuade the city to illuminate the area.

One “conceived the bold idea of getting out some letterheads with a community-club name, calling himself the president and his neighbor the secretary. On behalf of this mythical organization, the two demanded a street light in front of their houses. Within a week … the light was in the desired spot.” The letterhead originator “thought the secret too good to keep, and the community-club movement had its beginning.”

Within Ballard, annexed to Seattle in 1907, the western sub-neighborhood of Sunset Hill (from the Locks to the city’s then-northern border of 85th Street) spawned a club in 1922. Two years hence, it bought land at the southwest corner of 66th Street and 30th Avenue. By 1929, the club’s stately home — with two large meeting floors, the upper one with a stage — opened for meetings and parties alike.

It remains a happy survivor, along with similar neighborhood clubhouses in Mount Baker (1914), Lakewood-Seward Park (1920), Haller Lake (1922) and Rainier Beach (1923). A few other such structures also endure citywide but in other uses.

With a succession of four names (Community Hall is the latest), the Sunset Hill club stated from the start that it welcomed all residents of the district, historically a Nordic American enclave that gradually has diversified. From securing street, water and transit improvements to presenting speeches, dances and performances, its leaders apprised members: “You are part of an organization that is getting results, and you would find great pleasure in doing your part.”

This rich mixture of the political and social over a near-century of service allowed the gleaming yellow hall to attain designation as a city landmark in March. The hall’s response was — what else? — to hold a party the following month, drawing a capacity crowd.

John Munroe, the club’s energetic president, acknowledges herculean efforts to keep intact both the building and its legacy.

“We’ve done tons of work on it over the years,” he says. “We will survive anything … We have all kinds of fun all the time because this is a community.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Robert Loe, John Munroe and especially Holly Taylor and Peggy Sturdivant 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 2 additional videos, 2 documents and 5 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.