Max Genereaux – 2024 Community Investment Award
Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 19, 2024. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature Max Genereaux, the 2024 Community Investment Award recipient.
Congratulations Max Genereaux!
If you step into an old bar and feel like you’ve gone back in time, then you’re experiencing a patina of place that’s hard to recreate. Authenticity is built over time and never rushed. Seattle’s legacy businesses (unfortunately, dwindling by the day) provide this link to the past and continue to be relevant, perhaps even more so these days. Whether out of nostalgia or wanting a place to connect with others, Seattle’s bar culture has a long history in our communities.
Historic Seattle honors Max Genereaux with a Community Investment award for his role in preserving and sustaining this culture through majority ownership of several establishments in Seattle. Max purchased Al’s Tavern in Wallingford in 1998. Opened in 1940, it is the quintessential neighborhood bar and that “has never tried to be anything more or less.” A more recent purchase in 2022 is the Rendezvous in Belltown. Unique for its historic film screening room called the Jewel Box Theater and private bar called the Grotto in the basement, it continues as a multi-use performance space today.
In Ballard, Max owns Hattie’s Hat, Sunset Tavern, and the Ballard Smoke Shop—all located in the Ballard Avenue Landmark District, where locals call Max “The Reviver.” One only needs to look beyond and around the historic district to see how the neighborhood has changed physically. As redevelopment marches on, Max and his business partners have managed to keep these legacy businesses around, serving as anchors for the community.
A March 27, 2024, Seattle Times article (“Why Ballard dive bars thrive in changing Seattle”) by food writer Bethany Jean Clement features Max and describes him as the “dive-bar savior.” She interviews Brad Holden, co-host of the podcast “Dim Lights & Stiff Drinks: The Dive Bars of Seattle,” and author of Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners and Graft in the Queen City, and asks him why some dives persist while so many others perish?
He responds, “It’s really the people.” What often happens is that many of the dive bars “have been on the brink of closing their doors for good.” “And then at the last minute, someone who appreciates the historical legacy of these places and why they’re important has stepped in, and basically rescues it by purchasing it and becoming the owner.” That new proprietor must appreciate the “true, original character of the place — someone who’s keen on preservation, not transformation to ‘a mojito bar, or an axe-throwing brewery, or whatever happens to be trendy at the time.’”
Fortunately for Seattle, there’s Max Genereaux. “I’m in for the long haul. I want to be 90 and coming down here.”
We’ll drink to that!
Image Courtesy of Erika Carleton