Behind the marquee.One block, one century.

The Building

A vacant lot of memory.

Built in 1893 as the Seven Seas hotel. Brick, four stories, ornate windows, then the long quiet century of small-business storefronts.

In the 1980s the ground floor became Seattle’s most infamous adult theater, the Lusty Lady, with its quarter-in-the-window peep show, unionized workers, and a marquee that for thirty years posted some of the funniest pun-jokes the city ever read.

It closed in 2010. The marquee was preserved. The doors were boarded. For fourteen years it sat dark on a corner across from the Seattle Art Museum.

We bought the building. Now we’re turning it into a contemporary art museum. While the demolition crews wait, we are letting the public in. You walk through it the way we’ve walked through it: with a flashlight, a hardhat, and the original 1893 brick exposed to the air for the first time in a hundred years.