Seattle’s original “bad neighborhood” was Pioneer Square. Bursting with saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors back in the early 1900s, it was nicknamed the Tenderloin based on the fact that beat cops assigned there could afford the best cuts of meat from all the pay-off money they collected.
This notoriety lasted several decades until sometime in the late 1960s when the neighborhood’s degeneracy started metastasizing northward along First Avenue, which soon become known as “flesh avenue” due to its bawdy array of peep shows, adult bookstores, pawn shops, seedy taverns, tattoo parlors, and strip clubs.
Along this corridor of carnality sat an innocuous doughnut shop. Located at First Avenue and Pike Street, The Donut House first opened in 1958 and initially operated as a wholesome, family-owned snack bar offering 52 varieties of donuts. As the surrounding area began its later descent into urban squalor, however, the original owners decided to sell the business, and it fell under new ownership.
By the late 1970s, The Donut House had established itself as a central gathering place for the local populace, particularly wayward youth. Its bright, exterior sign served as a beacon for street kids who sought out its warm interior and cheap coffee. It soon became a top hang-out spot for local teen runaways and those who preyed on them. As a result, the once-pleasant doughnut shop was steadily transformed into a direct reflection of its seedy environment, becoming a regular nuisance stop for the police.
In order to present some semblance of law and order, a hand-written sign was posted on the wall which instructed, “No Loitering…No Bare Feet, Bottoms, Tops…Obscene Language Will Not Be Tolerated…Absolutely No Booze, Drugs Or Gambling In The Donut House.” Such rules would prove to be nothing more than subterfuge for its true purpose.
Throughout much of the 1970s, the business was owned and operated by a middle-aged and friendly man named Guenter Mannhalt. On the surface Mannhalt was a genial fellow who took pity on all the local street kids, allowing his donut shop to serve as a sort of temporary sanctuary from the outside world. He would often provide free food in exchange for an hour of scrubbing floors or washing dishes in the back. For many homeless youth at the time, The Donut House was a safe house with Mannhalt as its benevolent father figure.
By the late ‘70s, some unsettling stories began emerging about The Donut House. Many of its teen customers were rumored to be involved in heavy drug use and prostitution, and in 1979 there was a fatal stabbing in the front doorway. The popular downtown hangout soon became a regular feature in the local papers, with one Seattle Times (3/4/1979) article reporting, “The reputation is legend. Fights, stabbings, prostitution, drugs, haven for pimps, pushers, and the predilection for downtown’s most notorious characters.” The Donut House would even make an appearance in the gritty documentary, “Streetwise.”
With all this growing infamy, stories also began emerging about Mannhalt himself. There were widespread rumors that his donut shop was merely a front for an elaborate crime ring in which he was fencing stolen goods taken from nearby businesses. Even more ominous were the stories that juvenile runaways were being recruited to carry out these robberies. Mannhalt soon became known as the “Doughnut Kingpin.”
Such suspicions were confirmed in 1980 when an extensive criminal investigation into these robberies led to the arrests of several teenagers who, in turn, squealed on Mannhalt. They claimed he was the criminal ringleader who had carefully orchestrated heists at such places as FX McRory’s, Jake O’Shaughessy’s, and The Old Spaghetti Factory. According to their claims, Mannhalt was the mastermind who supplied the teens with everything they would need to conduct these crimes, such as guns and getaway cars. Afterwards, they would split the proceeds with him.
The Donut House was subsequently raided, and police officers found a hoard of stolen plunder down in the basement. One report described what they found as “a treasure trove of assorted goods that tended to make Ali Baba’s 40 thieves look like petty pilferers.” The items included silver coins, jewelry, loose gems, sterling silver tableware, furs, and cameras. Even a Seattle police officer’s badge, stolen earlier in the year, turned up in the search.
The resulting story was extensively covered by the local media in which Mannhalt was described as a modern-day “Fagin” (that adult villain from the Charles Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, who had turned street urchins into a gang of thieves). As a Seattle Times story described it, “the shop was a rallying spot … for dropouts, drug addicts, street people, and other youths who under the direction of Mannhalt fanned out to perform holdups and share their rewards with him.” In one interview, a 17-year-old hustler reported that he had stolen valuable jewelry from his affluent customers, which he then sold to Mannhalt for a fraction of its appraised value. The youth asked: “If I didn’t sell it to him then who would I sell it to?”
After the news broke, more stories about Mannhalt’s past emerged. Turns out that he had once owned a grocery store named Bluma’s, located near Garfield High School. In the late 1960s, he had been arrested for selling beer to minors. Police also found him with a stash of narcotics. This ignited racial tensions, as many within the Central District community were enraged to learn that Mannhalt had been selling beer and dealing drugs to local Black teens. The Urban League, led by Black activist Edwin Platt, asked the city to revoke Bluma’s business license. The Seattle chapter of the Black Panthers occupied his store, and Bluma’s was firebombed.
In 1968, Mannhalt was arrested again on a separate charge of burglary. He pled guilty to grand larceny charges and went to prison. Five years later, after his release, he took over ownership of The Donut House.
Following his arrest in 1980, Mannhalt maintained that he had nothing to do with any of the downtown robberies and that all the loot found in his doughnut shop was merely collateral for loans that he had made. His story did not stick, though, and in 1981 he was convicted of more than a dozen robbery-related charges and returned to prison.
Afterwards, the owners of the building decided not to renew the lease for The Donut House, prompting its closure in 1981. Today, the former site of the infamous business houses the Seattle Shirt Company. As a grim footnote in the history of The Donut House, one of its former regulars, Roberta Joseph Hayes (who appeared in the “Streetwise” documentary), would later be identified as one of the victims of the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway.
As for Mannhalt, he served only seven years of a 10-year sentence and was freed in the fall of 1988. Little is known about his post-prison life. According to a Linked In account attached to his name, he spent his last years working as a tax-preparation consultant for a Seattle-based business. An online obituary shows that he died in 2019.
That would not be the end of his story, though. In June 2022, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice posthumously identified Mannhalt as a top suspect in the 1969 assassination of Edwin Pratt, the late director of the Seattle Urban League who had been an active participant in shutting down Mannhalt’s grocery store back in the 1960s. Pratt’s admired legacy is commemorated today by Seattle’s Pratt Park and the Pratt Fine Arts Center.
