The Wildrose: A Long-Running Lesbian Bar at the Heart of Capitol Hill

At the corner of East Pike Street and 11th Avenue, The Wildrose occupies a small but significant place in Seattle’s LGBTQ history. The Capitol Hill bar opened in 1985 and is identified as the city’s only lesbian bar.

The Wildrose is LGBTQ-owned and operates on the ground floor of a mixed-use apartment building. Constructed in 1905, the building was designed by architects Carl Breitung and Theobald Buchinger. It was originally called Lorraine Court and is now known as the Winston Building, giving the bar a home with a history that predates Seattle’s modern LGBTQ rights movement by decades.

Business partners Shelley Brothers and Martha Manning are the bar’s current owners. They took over from The Wildrose’s original founders in the early 2000s, continuing an establishment that has served as a dedicated gathering place for lesbians and the broader LGBTQ community.

The bar’s story is part of a longer Seattle tradition. During the 1950s, Pioneer Square and Downtown were central to the city’s LGBTQ social life, and Seattle’s first lesbian bars opened in those areas. The Hub began operating in 1950, followed by venues including the Grand Union, Sappho’s Tavern, Madison Tavern and the Silver Slipper. Before those businesses, lesbians also gathered at queer bars such as The Casino and The Garden of Allah.

That earlier history helps place The Wildrose in context. Lesbian bars offered spaces where women could meet and socialize in a period when openly queer community life faced substantial social pressure. One of The Wildrose’s founders, Bryher Herak, viewed such venues as important early gathering places that provided acceptance.

The Wildrose’s location also connects it to Capitol Hill, a neighborhood widely associated with Seattle’s LGBTQ community. Its continued identity as a lesbian bar distinguishes it within the city’s nightlife landscape, while its ownership and long tenure link the present-day business to the lesbian bars that came before it.

From its 1985 opening to the transition in ownership during the early 2000s, The Wildrose has remained part of Seattle’s evolving queer history. Its address, its purpose and its place in a century-old building all reflect different layers of the city’s past and present.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “The Wildrose (bar)” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wildrose_(bar) The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.thestranger.com/queer-issue-2017/2017/06/21/25227858/my-first-time-at-the-wildrose - https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/seattlersquos-pioneering-lesbian-bar-wildrose-turns-30/ - https://www.seattlechannel.org/videos?videoid=x60028 - https://www.knkx.org/post/more-just-place-seattles-wildrose-among-lesbian-bars-benefitting-fundraiser - https://web.archive.org/web/20190921061852/https://www.thestranger.com/queer-issue-2017/2017/06/21/25227858/my-first-time-at-the-wildrose - https://web.archive.org/web/20180826080819/https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/seattlersquos-pioneering-lesbian-bar-wildrose-turns-30/ Image rights Original illustrative artwork created from story keywords. It is not a documentary photograph.