Find of the Month
Each month we highlight interesting, important, and odd items from our collection, along with the stories they tell.
Most recent Find of the Month
October 2026 - "Boisterous conduct"
An establishment called the Madison Square Beer Garden opened at 15th and Madison in 1933, and it didn’t take long for complaints to follow. A widow who owned a residential building next door sent a complaint to City Council:
My apartment house has always had a very splendid reputation and I have only had the very finest tenants. Since this beer parlor was opened on the corner, it is almost impossible for me to keep any tenants in the building. The noise, the hilarity, the boisterous conduct of the patrons, is such as to keep my tenants up until the early hours of the morning.
The managers of another nearby apartment building complained of “drunken brawls, yelling, and the tooting of auto horns as patrons leave the place, congregating in the street from 1 to 4 a.m.” The influential Presbyterian minister Mark Matthews claimed that it was “filthy, noisy, disgusting, and detrimental to the community” and declared that “these beer joints should not be allowed in the residential districts.”
A police sergeant weighed in with an opposing view, claiming he did not see the business as a problem:
I have personally been on calls to this place regarding complaints and have never had any occasion to make an arrest. It is my opinion that this place is conducted in an orderly manner and is more quiet than the average café where beer is dispensed.
And a petition signed by about 150 neighbors declared that the beer garden was “conducted on a very gentlemanly basis” and asked that “you take no notice of the complaint.”
The tavern continued to evoke strong feelings, as evidenced in two near fistfights between a citizen and the city council president in council chambers over the course of a week. According to the Seattle Times, the tavern’s license was eventually revoked in 1934.
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