Reverman opened the Blue Moon just as Prohibition was ending, making it one of Seattle's earliest post-repeal taverns. From the beginning, the bar broke with convention. It was among the first in the city to forcefully cross racial barriers, serving anyone who walked through the door at a time when much of Seattle remained deeply segregated. Hank ran the place for several years before leaving for military service, where he became a pilot. The bar passed through other hands, but its character was already set: a gathering place defined not by who it excluded but by who it welcomed. That principle -- doors open, pretensions checked -- would carry the Blue Moon through the decades that followed.

In the early 1950s, McCarthyism reached the University of Washington. Faculty members suspected of leftist sympathies were investigated, dismissed, or pressured to resign. Several of them found refuge a few blocks from campus at the Blue Moon. Joe Butterworth, a UW professor swept up in the purge, turned the bar into his personal writing desk, working amid the clatter of glasses and the haze of cigarette smoke. The tavern's heyday stretched through the 1950s and 1960s, when it became an unofficial faculty lounge for the kind of professors the university would not officially claim. Poets gathered alongside labor organizers, graduate students argued with dockworkers, and the line between the academy and the street blurred in the way it can only blur in a place where the beer is cheap enough that nobody needs to posture.

Among the Blue Moon's most celebrated regulars was Theodore Roethke, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who taught at the University of Washington from 1947 until his death in 1963. In 1995, the city honored that connection by naming the alley to the west of the bar Roethke Mews. But the tribute almost came too late. By the 1970s, the Blue Moon had declined, and in 1989 developers set their sights on the property. Community activists led by historian Walt Crowley rallied to save it. An attempt to win landmark status in 1990 failed, yet the developers ultimately spared the building anyway. The Blue Moon survived not because of any official designation but because enough people fought for it -- a bar saved by the kind of stubborn loyalty it had always inspired.

The Blue Moon celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2024, a milestone that would have seemed improbable during its lean decades. Out front stands the Hammered Man, a sculptural parody of Seattle's famous Hammering Man, a winking nod to the bar's identity. Inside, a poster from Albert Rosellini's 1960 gubernatorial re-election campaign hangs on the wall, a relic from an era when politicians still courted votes in dive bars. The business has been described, without apology, as a dive bar -- one of the few surviving blue-collar landmarks in a neighborhood that has otherwise given itself over to student housing and chain restaurants. The University District has changed around it, growing sleeker and more expensive with each passing decade. The Blue Moon remains: scuffed, unapologetic, and open.