Soon enough they will bulldoze that building and add another condo on the Hill. So sad.

I am from Seattle, we lived Capitol Hill when I was a little kid. We moved away when I was three, then moved back a year later. We arrived from North Dakota, my mom and me ahead of everyone else, and we lived in an apartment on 10th Ave E from 1970 and for several years on. My step-dad was a student at Cornish and had friends in the film co-op that used to meet upstairs. Harvard Exit was the first theater I went to, and is where I learned to love film and the film going experience. The building is a treasure, and as a theater, it is irreplaceable. You can not design the experience it creates, it is something that has to be formed out of time. To paraphrase Jane Jacobs, new ideas need old spaces to thrive.

Seattle is a laugh. The United Fascist Corporate Developer States of America are a joke. NO self-respecting culture allows it's landmarks to be destroyed en masse at the hands of profiteers to the point where nothing is left at all. There are no cultural institutions left in America. Malls and chain stores and casinos and football are NOT culture. We have a symphony that can't bypass vacation long enough to play anything but Handel's Messiah every year. Wow, how original. I bet the Boeing engineer drones making drones approve. Go to Vienna and see how many options you have in the month of December. This city has some outdoor amenities, and a lot of bars, but otherwise, it's overpriced beyond belief for what it offers. Oh, sorry, I forgot, the Seattle Arts Commission is designating Art Districts across the city, this after allowing developers to evict every single uncommissioned artist living space across Belltown and Pio Square over the last ten years. But there's Georgetown, oh wait, Fran's chocolates is down there boring everyone to death, with NOT ONE PIECE of ART on its walls. This city is a total joke. I mean, tell people they can get jobs here, but don't tell them how artistic this city is, because it isn't.

Randy Finley started Seven Gables (a Seattle company), which merged with Landmark (a California company) after Randy had moved on to other endeavors. A lot of really passionate people gave us the chance to love the movies as much as they did. Thanks to everyone in Seattle who built and nurtured those theatres, who inspired excellence and showmanship by the employees, to the Local 154 operators who worked every night to make it look good, and to the customers who came and appreciated both the films and the theatres.

Sorry to see that the Stranger couldn't find someone with more history living in Seattle to write this piece. The Harvard Exit deserves respect via a journalist who knows this city and and theater on a more intimate basis. Seven years sweeping floors? Big deal. How about 20+ years attending 100's of screenings? How about someone who actually encountered one of the ghosts? The alleged suicide in the upstairs powder room is a complete fabrication of the author. There is indeed a ghost, and the people who host the Capitol Hill Ghost Tour know all the details from personal eye-witness accounts. My own story is one of them. Too bad the Stranger editorial staff couldn't find someone to write this piece with more of a vested interest in the Women's Century Club and the Harvard Exit Theater.

WOW. WOW again.



I managed the Harvard Exit for about two years. 1981-82, beginning about 3-4 months after Jim and Art tuned it over to Landmark.



Pretty much spent 12 hours a day there. I opened 'Top of the Exit'. Opened the building every Sunday morning for the ladies of the Women's Century Club for their meetings. Got married in the parlor in front of the fireplace one Sunday morning in January 1984 while Clem Zip played 'Sunny Side of the Street' on the grand piano. Also put that old projector in there after Linda Rajote had purchased it. I and a friend personally restored the scroll work above the entry and back doors and built and installed the movie poster cases in the lobby and up the stairway. I even did the logo thing that sits lighted above the outside poster case on the front of the building. (We built that, too.)



As you can tell I have a lot of history with that place and I'm sad to hear it's going by the way. It was routinely voted best movie theater in Seattle for many years. It's a big loss for the entire city.



Landmark should be ashamed, but they are probably getting a pile of money and feel no remorse. It's the way of things these day in Seattle.

The loss of the Harvard Exit is tragic, but so is the loss of journalistic standards. This three sentence headline reads like a narcissistic Facebook post.

O, this is so sad.

Where are all the ghosts going to go?