Blue Moon Tavern

History

The Blue Moon Tavern opened in April 1934 at 712 NE 45th Street in Seattle, just past the old one-mile line that kept alcohol off the University of Washington campus. Henry Hank Reverman, then 21, put his college fund into a former garage and hung a neon sign bought from the Blue Moon Cafe. Through the 1950s and 1960s it was a table for poets and radicals, Theodore Roethke among them. Neighbors fought off redevelopment in 1989, and the alley beside it was named Roethke Mews in 1995.