The Bluff Building. Oct. 2015. (Image: Tom Heuser)

With the Comet being lined up for a “speakeasy” addition, here is a look back at a history of the 113-year-old Bluff Building at 10th and Pike the tavern calls home that first ran on CHS in 2015 from historian Tom Heuser and the Capitol Hill Historical Society. You can learn more at tgheuser.co and capitolhillpast.org.

 By Tom Heuser

On May 29, 1889 the graduating class of MIT in Boston gathered in Huntington Hall to hear the commencement speech of the renowned reverend Phillips Brooks. Towering over them at 6’3” and 300 pounds, he thundered “the water of the river is at first distinct and separate from the sea, but with time… is embodied into one vast whole; and so… will your course in life pass away until nothing but the knowledge that something of new good and of new strength has been added to the world will remain.” A straightforward metaphor for life, death, and the contributions one leaves behind, but who was to say one couldn’t take their existing course, cast it into the void, and anonymously reemerge on a distinctly new one all in a single lifetime?

One of the graduates that day, named Charles Dodge, eventually believed exactly that and it led him to Seattle where he ran off with his mistress 13 years later. Together they established a considerable real-estate empire that included the land on which the Bluff Building stood at the northwest corner of 10th and Pike: home of the Comet Tavern since the early 1950s. Even here, Dodge’s ethos of escapism has endured in one form or another through its well documented history as a popular dive bar and music venue where many have gathered to escape everyday life through loud music, alcohol, and often illegal drugs. But long before Nirvana performed there in 1988, the whole building was a hub for many who shared Dodge’s outlook on life. Continue reading →