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According to theatre historian Eugene C. Elliott, John Cort's Palm Garden Theatre operated during the buoyant economic period of the Klondike/Cape Nome Gold Rush in Seattle, WA, from 1898-1900. (See Eugene Clinton Elliott, A History of Variety-Vaudeville in Seattle from the Beginning to 1914, Appendix I, [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1944], p.66.) A very bad economy wiped out most Seattle theatres during the 1893-1896 period, but the discovery of gold in the Klondike region of Canada and near Nome, AK, brought thousands of people through the city, jump-starting the local economy. John Cort (1859-1929), previously a somewhat shady box-house owner was one of those wiped out, but he returned from New York when times became economically better. Cort wanted to produce shows for a mass audience when he returned, not just for men in a saloon-setting. Lacking capital, he first opened his Palm Garden Theatre in the basement of a large theatre he was planning, the Grand Opera House. The Palm Garden helped him raise money to erect the Grand, which, during the 1900s, became one of the leading venues for music and drama in Seattle.

Seattle architect Paul Hayden Kirk (1914-1995) completed an addition to the Ethel House in 1954.

PCAD id: 17842