In addition to being the venue Nirvana picked for their Nevermind release party-wherein the band got kicked out of their own show after sneaking a handle of Jack Daniel’s and then starting a cake fight-Re-Bar is home to the longest-running weekly house nights on the West Coast: the two-and-a-half-decade-old Seattle Poetry Slam, the birthplace of drag comedienne Dina Martina, as well as a safe space for generations of LGBTQ+ performers and patrons alike.
The building itself, located at 1114 Howell, is sort of an anomaly in that’s it’s historic in a way, not. It was built in 1930, so certainly, it’s old, but it’s single-story and not constructed particularly interestingly or well. Sitting at the foot of Capitol Hill, just a hair into the Cascade neighborhood, it’s a rectangular, reinforced-masonry structure-that probably does, appropriately, contain rebar-and has always been a bar or restaurant, replacing Pete’s Coffee Shop, an unassuming lunch counter that stood at Boren and Howell in the 1920s.Ī boarding house also used to occupy this spot. Vidal, “a man with family in great need,” posted several desperate ads in the Seattle Times (then the Seattle Daily Times) looking for work with 1114 Howell as his listed address. Vidal) was trying to sell resurrection plants for 15 cents. Costello had a daughter while living at this address. In 1910, visiting French civil engineer Francois Duval died in his chair and was found by his landlady, Mrs.