“The Wildrose got its start in the early 1980s, when a collective of five women began scouting locations for a new lesbian bar. They wanted to open a women’s bar that was light, served good food, and was a place where women would feel comfortable bringing friends and family, straight and gay. They settled on the location of the Sundance Tavern, a sports bar frequented by Seattle University students on the corner of 11th Avenue and East Pike Street. ‘Nothing much was happening in the Pike/Pine corridor at the time,’ says Bryher Herak, one of the five women in the collective, ‘but it felt right to be on Capitol Hill. That’s where most of the men’s bars were, and we all fell in love with the Sundance’s location.’ And at a time when most of the city’s gay bars were unmarked and hidden away, the bar had big windows that looked out on a main street.”—Dani Cone, The Stranger, 2002
