This week in Seattle history: Space Needle shenanigans

April 1, 1989: For April Fools' Day, KING 5 sketch comedy show "Almost Live" "reported" that the Space Needle had collapsed. It was a joke, but many viewers took it seriously.

• Calls from concerned citizens flooded the Space Needle, the Seattle Police Department and KING 5's phone lines.
• "A lot of people wanted us fired," the comedy show's host John Keister recalled during a KING 5 appearance on the prank's 20th anniversary.
• In 1999, "Almost Live" ended its run of hyperlocal comedy sketches, including classics like "The Ballard Driving Academy," "Seattle Drivers in Snow" and "Pike or Pine."
• But the show lives on in every Seattleite's confusion over whether that one really good Thai place is on Pike or Pine — and on Aug. 31, the show will be memorialized in an exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry.

April 2, 1900: In his push for the Democratic presidential nomination, "The Boy Orator of the Platte" William Jennings Bryan arrived in Seattle, where he railed against imperialism and the gold standard.

• "As he stepped from the train he came face to face with a crowd conservatively estimated at between 10,000 and 12,000," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported from the scene.

• Bryan's message appealed to some, but he lost the presidency to William McKinley (and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt).

March 30, 1971: The first Starbucks in Seattle opened, but it didn't sell espresso — just beans — with free coffee by the cup to attract customers.

• Visitors often mistake the Pike Place Starbucks for the original, but the bean-slinging actually began at 2000 Western Avenue, in a building that no longer exists.