By 1891, he was manager of the People's Theater, a box house in the wide-open "restricted district" below Yesler Way in what is now Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood.

[6] A friendly, outgoing, but resolutely sober man in a rowdy environment, he dealt cards but did not play, made money off the sale of liquor but did not drink, managed a business whose profits depended on its female performers hustling drinks (and, in Murray Morgan's words, "If the girls wished to peddle more personal wares, management did not object"), but was reputed to be a faithful family man.

[6] Considine decided that he could out-compete the other box houses by raising the level of entertainment, hiring professional actresses for the stage and letting other girls work the floor and the "dark booths".

He briefly attempted to run the People's Theater as a proper theater; he ran a box house in Spokane, Washington before a similar anti-vice administration shut him down; and he returned to Seattle and lay relatively low until the Klondike Gold Rush (1897) brought back an "open town" administration.

On November 25, 1899 the Seattle Star described him as "a man of great reputation among the toughs and criminals, inasmuch as he formerly walked the streets of a rough frontier mining town with big pistols stuck in his belt, spurs on his boots and a devil-may-care expression upon his official face".

The Seattle Daily Times was less full of praise, announcing in a very small article that he had a reputation in Arizona as a "bad man".

But Earp partnered with an established local gambler named Thomas Urquhart and they opened the Union Club saloon and gambling operation in Seattle's Pioneer Square.

An ambitious politician named John Wilson started a Law and Order League charging Meredith and Mayor Thomas J. Humes with a variety of offenses.

[22] Meanwhile, Meredith had acquired a virtual arsenal: besides the shotgun (which he had wrapped in butcher paper), he was carrying a .32 Colt in a .45 frame and a .38-caliber short-barreled revolver.

[23] Meredith waited at the corner of Yesler and Occidental, where he expected the Considines would go to catch the streetcar back up the hill.

Considine managed to grab Meredith in a bear hug and drag him toward the entrance, yelling out for help from his brother, who finally realized what was happening.

Considine shot Meredith three times in the chest and neck, killing him, then handed his gun to Sheriff Cudihee and surrendered himself.

[31] Difficulty in obtaining first-rate acts to play a city so distant from the major concentrations of North American population led Considine to establish one of the first vaudeville circuits (quite possibly the very first), with theaters in Victoria, Vancouver, Portland, Bellingham, Everett, Yakima, and Spokane as well as Seattle.

business, he met and teamed up with Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan to form the Sullivan–Considine vaudeville circuit and associated nationwide booking agency.

Murray Morgan characterizes their rivalry as that between a well-connected, savvy businessman (Considine) and a hardworking uneducated genius (Pantages).

Still, with World War I clobbering access to international stars, Considine's circuit fell apart, and Pantages bought up the pieces.

[38][39] All concerned eventually moved to Los Angeles, which by then had firmly established itself as the West Coast entertainment capital.

[42][43] The 172 S. Washington Street basement that housed Considine's original People's Theater survives, although the building has lost its upper stories.

At the corner of Second Avenue South, the remaining aboveground floor houses a pawnshop, Barney's Loans[44] and a longstanding gay/drag bar, the Double Header.

The decorative wrought iron canopy extending from over the box office to the curb out became "a fixture of the 3rd Avenue landscape"; the lavish interior was "awash in marble, onyx, and glass.

"[48] The murals of the equally lavish auditorium depicted classical and mythological themes: scenes from The Iliad and Odyssey, Aesop and the 12 Muses.

[50] A later Orpheum, also the work of Priteca, stood from 1927 to 1967 at the corner of 5th Avenue and Stewart Street, now the site of the south tower of the Westin Hotel.