Happy Archives Month!

October is American Archives Month! We hope you’ll join us in this annual celebration recognizing the value of archives and the work archivists do. This year’s Archives Month theme in Washington State is Find Your Story: Choose Your Own Adventure in Archives, highlighting the process of discovery inherent to research and learning. 

On October 20, you’ll find us in the first floor main lobby at Seattle City Hall hosting an Archives Month pop-up from 11:30am to 2pm. SMA archivists will be on hand to answer questions, share information about the archives, and give away cool archives swag. We’ll be joined by our City Records Management colleagues who work closely with us here in the City Clerk’s Office. We hope you’ll stop by and say hello!

Read on below for details on more events we're planning to celebrate Archives Month!

Save the Date: Lunchtime Rewind

Mark your calendars! We're planning another Lunchtime Rewind archival film screening where we bring you a curated selection of films sourced from SMA's collections. The screening will take place in the Bertha Knight Landes Room on the first floor of Seattle City Hall on November 9th.

We're planning to offer two screenings this time - one at noon and another at 1pm. Bring your lunch and join us for some history! Be sure to follow our blog Primary Sources for more details coming soon on the films we'll be showing and a link for registering to attend.

Hispanic Heritage Month: El Centro de la Raza

54 years ago this month on October 11, 1972, a group of activists from Seattle's Latino community began peacefully occupying the abandoned and boarded up Beacon Hill School building (seen here, circa 1970), establishing El Centro de la Raza. The move called attention to the need for a Latino community center that would provide a range of services including bilingual education, health and child care, legal services, and more.

After months of occupation, as well as demonstrations at City Hall (including a nearly six-hour sit-in at Mayor Uhlman’s office and a peaceful occupation of Council chambers as seen in the recently digitized photo below), the city and school district eventually agreed to lease the property to the group for $1 a year in May of 1973. 

Find of the Month: "Boisterous Conduct"

An establishment called the Madison Square Beer Garden opened at 15th and Madison in 1933, and it didn’t take long for complaints to follow. A widow who owned a residential building next door sent a complaint to City Council: "My apartment house has always had a very splendid reputation and I have only had the very finest tenants. Since this beer parlor was opened on the corner, it is almost impossible for me to keep any tenants in the building. The noise, the hilarity, the boisterous conduct of the patrons, is such as to keep my tenants up until the early hours of the morning."

The managers of another nearby apartment building complained of “drunken brawls, yelling, and the tooting of auto horns as patrons leave the place, congregating in the street from 1 to 4 a.m.” The influential Presbyterian minister Mark Matthews claimed that it was “filthy, noisy, disgusting, and detrimental to the community” and declared that “these beer joints should not be allowed in the residential districts.”

A police sergeant weighed in with an opposing view, claiming he did not see the business as a problem: "I have personally been on calls to this place regarding complaints and have never had any occasion to make an arrest. It is my opinion that this place is conducted in an orderly manner and is more quiet than the average café where beer is dispensed." And a petition signed by about 150 neighbors declared that the beer garden was “conducted on a very gentlemanly basis” and asked that Council “take no notice of the complaint.”

Read other Find of the Months on our website!