Showbox at the Market

History

The Show Box opened on July 24, 1939, at 1424 First Avenue as a dine-and-dance ballroom that Michael Lyons billed as the Palace of the Pacific. The 1917 building had been the Central Market and, before Prohibition, the Angeles Saloon. Duke Ellington played there in 1940. It later closed and came back as a theater, a dance club, a furniture store, the teenage club The Gathering, and a bingo hall that sometimes rented out for rock shows. In 1990 it reopened as Budd Friedman's Seattle Improv. When the SoDo room opened, this one was renamed Showbox at the Market.