When Dick Parker's Pavilion opened for business in 1930, they kicked off a long streak of booking popular local acts (including Putt Anderson & his Dixieland Band, and orchestras led by Frankie Roth, Burke Garrett, and Max Pillar) and a number of national stars as Tommy Dorsey’s, Guy Lombardo’s, and Jan Garber's orchestras. Parker's self-built hall was some sort of a remarkable architectural marvel: the thing was basically a 20,000 square foot wide-open dance floor with absolutely no posts obstructing. In the end Parker acquired a 5-acre plot at 170th Street on the "New Seattle-Everett Highway" and in 1929 construction got underway. This was in an effort to escape various harsh city ordinances that restricted public dancing and other nightlife activities. 1940), a meatpacker by trade, who purposefully limited his search for a building site to those located just outside of Seattle’s northern city limits (then drawn at 85th Street). The roadhouse was founded by its namesake, Dick Parker (d. Unlike most other historic dancehalls, Parker's survived into the twenty-first century before being demolished in 2012. Like a few other local dancehalls, it spanned all of the sequential musical era’s from the wild jazz days of the Prohibition Era right on up through the forties swing scene, from the rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the fifties, to the psychedelic sixties, and onwards to the heavy metal, disco, and punk rock scenes of the seventies. Seattle's venerable Parker's Ballroom (which opened in 1930 on the "New Seattle-Everett Highway," now known as Aurora Avenue N) held a unique place in Northwest music history.
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