In this photo Gracie Hansen (left) is shown at the Tacoma Elk Club promoting her Las Vegas-style show to be featured at the Century 21 Exposition, the official name of the Seattle World’s Fair. On that March 7, 1962, Hansen addressed the Tacoma Advertising Club with her speech titled “Century 21, After Dark.”
Behind the sumptuously dressed Hansen and an unidentified man is her billboard with a Space Needle, bottle of Almaden Rose champagne, plus a dancing chorus girl holding a strategically placed apple. Each day of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, Hansen presented her “Night in Paradise,” a burlesque show held at a 700-seat theater-restaurant housed in a building constructed from slabs of concrete tilted up to form walls. Born in 1922, Gracie Diana was the daughter of a Sicilian barber. She grew up in Longview and Centralia, Washington before eloping to nearby Morton with a logger named Leo Hansen.
There, Gracie described a life of quiet desperation in a sleepy timber town. So she organized a hometown variety show filled with ideas borrowed from the Hollywood movies she adored. Hansen later divorced and eventually moved to Seattle, thinking there might be opportunities at the coming World’s Fair. She basically talked her way into an exhibit at the fair by advancing a Vegas-style show, and quickly rounded up $90,000 in financing, invested by Seattle businessmen.
Featuring some nudity from the waste up, Hansen endlessly promoted her show with quotes like, “We may go broke, but we’ll never be flat-busted.” Her building featured an attention-grabbing neon sign of an apple with a missing bite, an obvious allusion to the Genesis story of Adam, Eve, and original sin. Hansen wore outrageous clothes and drove around town in her gold-plated Buick becoming, “the most talked about woman in Seattle.” After the fair, the “Paradise” building was sold to King County which moved it to the former coal-mining town of Ravensdale and renamed it the Gracie Hansen Community Center. It’s located at 27132 S.E. Ravensdale Way and surrounded by a park. This photo #D133896-2 by Richard Studios comes courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library.
