1962 World's Fair

Spring Arts 2012: Then and Now

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Visual Art

From the Fun Forest...
The Fun Forest’s days were numbered. A once-bustling Gayway where little Joe Kennedy (Bobby’s son) rode the Wild Mouse coaster and carnival gamers won stuffed donkeys, the multimillion-dollar amusement park had become a dreary forest—a ghost town of derelict bumper cars. The city decided not to renew its lease in 2007, and the Fun Forest owner started selling it off, piece by piece. The Wild River. The Orbiter. The Tornado. On January 2, 2011, the carousel made its final turn.

...To the Glass Forest
In April 2011, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a Dale Chihuly glass art exhibition at the site of the Fun Forest—a space Chihuly’s work could occupy for the next 30 years, all but securing the Northwest artist’s local legacy. The numbers were staggering: a projected $25 million for construction, $50 million for glass, and a 1.5-acre property with an outdoor exhibit that could be seen from the Space Needle. And maybe from space. “Every artist wants their work to be seen by as many people as possible,” Chihuly said. “It’s a dream come true.”

The exhibition, slated to open this spring, is divided into nine galleries—which include the neon Glass Forest, a 15-foot Sealife Tower, and the largest collection of Mille Fiori—in addition to a 70-seat theater, gift shop, cafe, and a 4,500-square-foot Glasshouse, home to Chihuly’s largest and latest work (pictured). Chihuly Garden and Glass, opening this spring, chihulygardenandglass.com

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The Making of a Sculpture

1. At Chihuly’s Boathouse hot shop on Lake Union, a team of glassblowers—plus Chihuly—start molding the 1,400-odd individual Persians that will comprise the Glasshouse installation. The process takes three to four months.

2. “Persians combine the delicacy of threaded Venetian glass…with the distinctive woven patterns that are the hallmark of his Baskets and Sea Forms,” wrote art historian Robert Hobbs. Chihuly’s first Persian Ceiling made its debut at Seattle Art Museum in 1992, and the new collection glows in autumn shades: red, orange, yellow, amber, oxblood, and citron.

3. As the Persians are completed, they’re packed into boxes and driven to Chihuly’s mockup studio about four miles away in Ballard.

4. Based on Chihuly’s early sketches and vision, his team fits the pieces together, one by one. “You just start putting this up and see what it looks like,” he said. “It just kind of unfolds—it happens.”

5. Chihuly visits the studio at all hours to tweak the angle of a piece, ever so slightly.

6. Once a 25-foot section of Persians is nestled together, the installation is disassembled, packed back into boxes, loaded onto another truck, and moved to a larger studio for the final mockup. Since the pieces aren’t numbered, Chihuly and his team fit them back together organically. (A nightmare for the Type A among us.)

7. Final destination: Seattle Center, where the 100-foot-long sculpture—one of the largest suspended single pieces Chihuly has ever made, bigger than the Fiori di Como in the Bellagio in Vegas—hangs 43 feet off the ground. The space is modeled after the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. “This is Dale’s Sainte-Chapelle,” his wife Leslie remarked.

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Image: Patricia Racette, ©Marty Sohl, Metropolitan Opera, 2009

Classical & Dance

From a Love Triangle...
Seattle Opera’s origin story starts with its own love triangle: a city, besotted by its shining new opera house, faced the dueling affections of two brand-new opera companies. One day in April 1963, Seattle Symphony’s opera committee (soon to be Seattle Opera) placed an ad in the Sunday Times for a production of La traviata with “world-famous stars” from the Metropolitan Opera in New York; just beneath it, Western Opera Company enticed with Broadway tenor Glenn Burris and Met soprano Jean Fenn in Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. Both shows ran the following month.

The companies struggled to play nice, squabbling over show selection, available singers, and dates of production—until a real-life tragedy occurred on November 22, 1963. President Kennedy had been shot. The world stood still. And no one cared much about opera tickets. By the new year, the two companies had joined forces under the Seattle Opera banner, and the city welcomed it with open ears.

...To a Love Duet
To close its 48th season, Seattle Opera will rely on the young love of 15-year-old geisha Cio-Cio-San, the “delicate butterfly” who falls for a dashing U.S. Naval officer, Lieutenant Pinkerton, stationed in Japan. Inevitably, she learns he’s a cad, but only after they’ve married and bared their legs and souls in a wedding night duet to end act one of Madama Butterfly. “It’s one of the longest love duets in Italian opera,” says general director Speight Jenkins. “And Butterfly is possibly one of the most sentimental of all operas.” Puccini’s tragedy is still wildly popular—and a great introduction for opera neophytes. Seattle Opera plans to simulcast opening night of Madama Butterfly in HD at KeyArena, where roughly 15,000 people can view the production for free.

The broadcast will be the company’s first foray into simulcasting, which has proved to be a sort of modern miracle for high art. The Metropolitan Opera set the standard six years ago under its big-spending new general manager Peter Gelb, investing in costly HD cameras to broadcast live performances to movie theaters worldwide. By democratizing opera, The Met: Live in HD grossed $11 million at the box office in 2010. Seattle Opera doesn’t have simulcast plans beyond Butterfly, but representatives acknowledge it could expand its audience exponentially, especially after newcomers hear soprano Patricia Racette sing the title role. The Met regular makes her Seattle debut in a part she now owns; her Butterfly is more emotionally complex, less porcelain doll, the way Puccini intended her to be. “Cio-Cio-San is an Italian woman in a kimono…. Asian restraint has nothing to do with this character,” Jenkins says.

Seattle Opera isn’t quite showing restraint either in its final seasons under Jenkins, who will step down in 2014 after 30 years at the helm. Turandot and La bohème are slated for the coming months, followed by Wagner’s Ring cycle in August 2013 (marking the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth). As it was in the beginning of Seattle Opera (and to borrow shamelessly from Lord of the Rings), there’s still “one Ring to bring them all.” Madama Butterfly, May 5–19, McCaw Hall, 206-389-7676; seattleopera.org

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THEATER

From a founder...
On paper, C. Bagley Wright was a manly cliche: a Princeton grad, Army veteran, New York City newsman, and real estate developer whose shrewd business acumen seemed a God-given gift. But in truth, Wright was a closeted thespian. When he moved to Seattle with his new wife Virginia in the late 1950s, his love of the arts fundamentally changed the culture of the city, starting with his patronage of Seattle Repertory Theatre. He served as its first president from 1963 to 1970—a make-or-break time for the city’s first regional theater company. “During those first five years, Bagley was the theater’s key emissary to the community,” Peter Donnelly, the Rep’s late producing director, told the Seattle P-I. “You’d see him at parties defending productions, defending actors, and assisting us in the formation of our image. It was a father-protector role.”

...To a Patron Saint
A shadow was cast on Seattle Rep’s 49th season when its father-protector, Bagley Wright, died of a heart attack on July 18, 2011, at the age of 87. Flags flew at half-staff across Seattle in honor of the game-changing arts patron and philanthropist, whose influence radiates from the top of the Space Needle (which he cofunded) to the depths of the modern art collection at Seattle Art Museum (which he and his wife Virginia supplied). And over at the House that Bagley Built, Seattle Rep has dedicated its current season to his memory.

But an even more fitting—if unintentional—tribute is the upcoming production of John Logan’s Red, a Tony-winning drama about abstract impressionist Mark Rothko and his young protege, Ken, in the midst of Rothko’s 1958 mural commission for the Four Seasons’ new restaurant. “I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room,” Rothko famously said. He was both brilliant and irascible—words oft used to describe a certain Mr. Wright—and a man whose rage was the same shade of vermillion as his canvases. Rothko’s bold block paintings made people question their definition of art, and that extended debate plays out between mentor and mentee on stage.

Theater and art collide in the Bagley Wright Theatre, where Denis Arndt will star as Rothko, and rising Seattle actor Connor Toms makes his Seattle Rep main-stage debut as Ken. Though it’s exciting to see Arndt back on a local stage—stints on primetime TV have kept him busy lately—it’s Cornish alum Toms we’re keeping an eye on. Rep artistic director Jerry Manning handpicked Toms to play Ken after seeing him as Homer Wells in the grueling seven-hour stage adaptation of The Cider House Rules. Toms is both the fictional representation of the next generation of artists, and the future of Seattle theater itself. “It’s almost like when Monet took on Manet—[Manet] almost becomes the master,” Toms said of the relationship in Red. “At the end of the day, you have to shine on your own.” Red, Feb 24–Mar 18, Seattle Repertory Theatre, 206-443-2222; seattlerep.org

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Editor’s Picks

Pygmalion
Seattle Shakespeare Company takes its first crack at a George Bernard Shaw work—his much beloved, oft adapted story of Professor Henry Higgins and Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle. Feb 23–Mar 11, Intiman Playhouse, 206-733-8222; seattleshakespeare.org

Help
Before they were the Beatles (insert high-pitched squeal here), they were just a few floppy-haired Liverpool teens. Dutch director Moniek Merkx tells the story of the days before their big break. Apr 12–May 13, Seattle Children’s Theatre, 206-441-3322; sct.org

The Art of Racing in the Rain
Myra Platt’s stage adaptation of Garth Stein’s best-selling novel presents a dog’s-eye view of life, love, and family. Apr 17–May 13, Center House Theatre, 206-216-0833; book-it.org

Million Dollar Quartet
Village Theatre hosted an early version of this Broadway musical about a legendary Sun Studio session with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins. The show comes home a Tony winner. May 15–20, Paramount Theatre, 877-784-4849; stgpresents.org

Red, Black, and Green: A Blues
This multimedia performance brings a beatboxer, dancer, and visual artists Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Theaster Gates together to muse about environmental justice. May 31–June 3, Seattle Center, 206-323-4032; cdforum.org

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Image: Rachelle Burnside/Shutterstock

Exhibits & Festivals

From Tut...
“Treasures of Tutankhamun is more than an exhibition, it’s a cultural phenomenon,” wrote Seattle Times art critic Deloris Tarzan in July 1978, days before a trove of 55 artifacts from King Tut’s tomb made its Seattle debut. That’s no hyperbole: The boy king was causing a stir nationally, as his alabaster casket, gilded dagger, and golden burial mask traveled from port to port, prompting a run on pyramid ashtrays and scarab paperweights. To prepare for the exhibit, Seattle Center underwent a $19.6 million renovation, and the city called on former World’s Fair GM Ewen Dingwall to manage the chaos that comes when royalty’s in town. The final numbers: $1 admission, $1.25 million budget, and 1,293,203 visitors to Tut’s traveling tomb—the largest crowd ever for a single event in Seattle.

...To Tut
Consider this King Tut’s farewell tour. Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs, the modern incarnation of the 1970s exhibit, will return to Egypt for good after its Seattle stay beginning May 24. And though we’re not expecting a revival of Cleopatra hairstyles this time around, expect to see something new, even if you walked through the treasure trove in 1978.

On tour since November 2008, this exhibit boasts twice as many artifacts as before: roughly 100 pieces from Tut’s tomb and its surrounding excavation sites, including the bust of Akhenaten, King Tut’s father, and a 10-foot quartzite statue of the young pharaoh that’s the largest likeness ever unearthed. Several pieces are familiar—a ceremonial wooden leopard’s head, and a canopic coffin for Tut’s organs—while others reveal new insight courtesy of twenty-first-century technology. Tut’s mummy forever rests in the Valley of the Kings, but a CT scan, on display here, reveals that the boy king had a recessed chin and quite the overbite.

Archaeologists have also uncovered the artifacts of several of Tut’s ancestors and successors, lending an additional 2,000 years of Egyptian history (and a bit more glamour) to this exhibit. The glowing gold funerary mask of Psusennes I, who ruled Egypt some 300 years after Tutankhamun, is stunning, like an unexpected trip through the vaults of Fort Knox. And then there’s the sarcophagus of Prince Thutmose’s beloved cat, proving there’s room in the afterlife for your pets.

But has Tut mania passed for good? Ticket prices aren’t the charitable $1 they used to be—multiply that by 15, to start. And Tut’s record-setting attendance was challenged—twice—in the past year by 150 Picassos at Seattle Art Museum and a collection of Harry Potter film props and costumes at Pacific Science Center. Only time will tell if mummies can compete with Muggles. Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs, May 24–Jan 6, Pacific Science Center, 206-443-2001; pacsci.org

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Editor’s Picks

Susie J. Lee: Of Breath and Rain
In Lee’s solo museum debut (marking the departure of Frye curator Robin Held), one of Seattle’s most innovative mixed-media artists restages an immersive electronic rainstorm. Feb 18–Apr 15, Frye Art Museum, 206-622-9250; fryemuseum.org

MOHAI History Exhibit: Celebrating Century 21
The three-exhibit series presents 129 years of American World’s Fairs, artifacts from MOHAI’s Seattle 1962 collection, and photography by the Young Social Entrepreneurs. Apr 21–Oct 21, Seattle Center, 206-324-1126; seattlehistory.org

NFFTY Future of Film Expo
Tucked into the National Film Festival for Talented Youth is a two-day event featuring speakers, workshops, and panels for filmmakers and film lovers interested in talking shop. Apr 27 & 28, Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, 206-905-8400; nffty.org

Seattle International Film Festival
The 38th-annual cinema smorgasbord—showing nearly 400 films to over 155,000 attendees—returns with more shorts, docs, features, and celebrity appearances. May 17–June 10, various venues, 206-324-9996; siff.net

Daniel Carrillo
With the use of ambrotypes—a nineteenth-century wet-plate photo process that requires its subjects to sit for one (very) long minute—the Seattle photographer creates timeless portraits of local artists and art critics. May 17–June 30, Greg Kucera Gallery, 206-624-0770; gregkucera.com

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Image: Municipal Archives/77813

PUBLIC  ART

From a Mural...
Beneath a canopy in the shadow of the Space Needle, Seattle collage artist Paul Horiuchi worked in secret, assembling his 60-foot-long, 17-foot-high mural piece by piece. Each glass tile had been handpicked in Venice; they came in 160 shades and varied shapes—large and small, curved and smooth. Slowly, the mosaic grew, a map of “the bright, gay colors of the Northwest, in contrast to the traditional somber grays and blues” Horiuchi said were common to the region. It was rumored to be the single largest piece of art in the Pacific Northwest—and one of the largest in America. A crowd gathered on the lawn in front of the veiled artwork, waiting for the big reveal on the second day of the 1962 World’s Fair. And at 4pm, they pulled back the cloak on the greatest kaleidoscope of color the city had ever seen: the Seattle Mural.

...To White Light
Brooklyn-based artist Adam Frank has figured out how to make the sun rise in Denver—a feat that obviously enticed Seattle city officials. With the use of solar panels the light artist created a real-time projection of the sun that rises up the face of the Minoru Yasui Building in downtown Denver as the actual sun sets; the orb fades as morning comes. It’s simple, straight-forward—and aspires to be a symbol of hope for the city, Frank said. Each time Sunlight appears, it showcases the possibilities of solar technology in Colorado, which gets 300 days of actual rays per year. But Frank could have his work cut out for him here.

“I’d never been to a place this far north; it gets dark so early,” he said. “Some days I haven’t even seen the sun.” As Seattle City Light’s artist in residence, light master Frank has a yearlong assignment to create new public art at Seattle Center and across the city. His first project: to install a 40-foot-high projection piece in Center House that demonstrates the flow of electricity in Seattle, in real time. Imagine a map of the city and its outskirts, with pinpoints of light shining brightly downtown during the workday, then skittering off to Ballard, Fremont, and Magnolia as worker drones head home. What our city lacks in solar power, we make up in hydropower; and Frank plans, as he did in Denver, to create artwork that delivers a message of sustainability and renewal.

“I try to be very simple and refined and direct,” he said. And though his medium isn’t as tangible as the glass tiles comprising the Seattle Mural just shy of Center House, it’s all the same to Frank. “All visual art is light work. The artist is just sculpting light.” New work by Adam Frank, Center House, Seattle Center

Concerts

From Nat King Cole...
During the World’s Fair, the refurbished Ice Arena was swingin’ with the sounds of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, Lawrence Welk and Ella Fitzgerald. But the star of the season was Nat King Cole, headlining four nights in July with hits like “Mona Lisa” and “(It’s Only a) Paper Moon.” Cole would succumb to lung cancer three years later, but Seattleites would never forget “Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer” in 1962.

...To Coldplay
Enough. Too many big-name acts have skipped Seattle in favor of Tacoma Dome in the past year. (We’re looking at you, Prince. You too, Jay-Z.) If we had our way, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and the Rolling Stones would all play KeyArena this year. What, hadn’t you heard? They’re all considering tours in 2012—and that’s in addition to the bands already confirmed. It’s going to be a busy spring. Coldplay, April 25, KeyArena, 800-745-3000; keyarena.com

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Editor’s Picks

Magnetic Fields
After taking over a decade off from his trademark synth sound, Stephin Merritt goes crazy on the keys for the 10th and latest album by his indie pop band, Love at the Bottom of the Sea. March 19 & 20, Neptune Theatre, 877-784-4849; stgpresents.org

Radiohead
Just days before headlining the two-weekend Coachella Music Festival in California, Thom Yorke and crew try out their latest album of moody alternative rock, The King of Limbs, on Seattle. Apr 9, KeyArena, 800-745-3000; keyarena.com

M83
Critics are calling Anthony Gonzalez’s latest work “combustive,” “an electro-pop dream,” the “best M83 record yet.” Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, with all its soaring synth refrains, commands your attention. April 26, Paramount Theatre, 877-784-4849; stgpresents.org

The Black Keys with Arctic Monkeys
The Grammy-winning pride of Ohio shares a blues-rock bill with the UK’s Arctic Monkeys. Both bands are at the top of their game, and their fans are rabid; buy tickets immediately. May 8, KeyArena, 800-745-3000; keyarena.com

Trimpin
Seattle kinetic sculptor Trimpin—he of Fire Organ fame—showcases his instruments-as-art in The Gurs Zyklus, a new libretto based on found letters from a Jewish internment camp. May 17–20, On the Boards, 206-217-9888; ontheboards.org

1962 World’s Fair 50th Anniversary

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Century 21 illustration By Earle Duff/Courtesy Museum of History and Industry

The World’s Fair of 1962 put Seattle on the map—it turns out we just needed to bring our own map. When fair organizer Joseph Gandy started shopping his idea to the Bureau of International Expositions, he had to point out Puget Sound: No, he’d say, not Washington, DC. He produced map cards with a big arrow: “Here is Seattle in the state of Washington, U.S.A.” It worked. Century 21 got official recognition by the BIE, a laurel that New York’s 1964 expo couldn’t claim.

Century 21 began as a downtown improvement project, a way to bring attention from the growing suburbs (and the just-out-of-town Boeing boom) to the center of the city. It ended up being a six-month spotlight on Seattle, drawing the likes of Elvis and the Shah of Iran to the growing metropolis. With a taste of international culture and the planners’ vision for a permanent legacy, Seattle’s art scene blossomed. And the city got its metal monuments: a sky-high tower and a zippy monorail, two mod totems that look as good in rain as they do in sun.

Dozens of nations sent envoys and exhibits to Seattle in 1962, and almost 10 million people filtered through its giant spectacle. The fair was a semipermanent carnival of cotton candy and peep shows, but the footprint it left came to define the city. Some remember the fair as merely a six-month PR blitz for the region, while others can still taste their first Belgian waffle.

Did the fair change Seattle, or did it reflect the space-crazy tech attitude that already pervaded the Northwest? It’s probably a little of both. A full 50 years later, we’ve still got the Space Needle, we’ve still got Seattle Center, and, for the most part, Seattle is still in charge of the future.

The 1962 World's Fair: A Timeline

The Seattle World’s Fair in 2012

Visionaries Imagine Seattle in 2062

Seattle Center House Recyled

Fiction: Jim Lynch’s World’s Fair Tale, Truth Like the Sun

Spring Arts 2012: Then and Now

The 1962 World’s Fair: A Timeline

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Municipal Archives/165652

The Begining
The A-Y-P Started It All

Century 21 wasn’t our first go-round. The 1962 extravaganza was first conceived as an anniversary of Seattle’s first and smaller world’s fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. On the Pay Streak midway at A-Y-P, a Baby Incubator Exhibit showed off preemies in new-fangled warmers, and the Igorrote Village exhibit allowed visitors to gawk at Filipino natives in thatched huts. “They were what we now think of as kind of politically incorrect,” says historian Paula Becker, coauthor of The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and Its Legacy. A-Y-P’s biggest legacy was less-cringeworthy: The fairgrounds shaped the then-tiny University of Washington campus.

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Funding the Fair
Organizers solicited some 300 local businesses to collectively invest up to $3 million to help offset the overall cost—$69 million—of producing the fair. Backers were promised that an average of 55,000 people would pay to enter the fair each day, and that the investors would receive 40 cents of every ticket sold.

A February 1960 prospectus titled “Your Investment in Century 21” painted the v gision of a futuristic metropolis, a city to which global denizens would flock en masse, wallets perpetually open. The rhetoric ranged from promises of new factories (“…as numerous industrial firms are favorably exposed to the benefits of the Northwest for plant location”) to ideological missiles in the Cold War (“the benefits of our free enterprise system will be effectively displayed”).

By December 1960, the prospectus had succeeded; Joseph Gandy and the organizing committee had topped their $3 million goal—with $250,000 to spare.

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The World’s Fair Committee

Image: Seattle Municipal Archives/56928

Faces of the Fair

Don Foster

International Exhibits

Then As a loaned executive from Frederick and Nelson department store, Don Foster joined the World’s Fair staff to help out for a year. One year turned to two and more as his job expanded to include responsibility for all foreign country exhibits. The skills he developed negotiating with the governments of Great Britain and Taiwan were later brought to bear in dealing with prominent artists such as Dale Chihuly and Morris Graves.

Now For 30 years, Foster owned and operated the iconic Foster/White gallery in Pioneer Square, launching the careers of many Northwest artists.

Joseph Gandy, a Ford dealership owner, would become fair director and the face of Century 21—newspaper columnists took to calling the expo Gandyland—but it was city council member Al Rochester who lit the first spark. Over martinis at the Washington Athletic Club in downtown Seattle in January 1955, Rochester, who’d drummed up business for the A-Y-P’s exotic dance shows as a boy, floated his idea for a grand 50-year anniversary to the chamber of commerce director and a Seattle Times reporter. By February, the governor of Washington had signed a bill creating a World Fair Commission and appointed hotelier Eddie Carlson as chair. “If you want to get an important job done, ask the busiest man in town,” the Times mused, after Carlson instituted regular 7am breakfast meetings of the committee. Carlson thought big: Before the year was up, plans were unfolding for a world’s fair and a new civic center. With the added brainpower of Gandy and general manager Ewen Dingwall—a former mayoral assistant—Rochester’s nostalgia-driven festival soon became the Century 21 Exposition, the fair of the future.

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Rearranging Seattle’s Traffic
With attendance predictions for the fair nearing 10 million, Century 21 shifted its congestion-coping brainstorming sessions into overdrive a year early; making visitors feel welcome was priority number one. “We must saturate this program with good old Western hospitality,” the expo’s vice president of transportation and parking, A. W. Morton, told The Seattle Times in April 1961. And aside from urging fairgoers to take public transit—like the flashy new monorail that flew above Fifth Avenue—that meant beefing up parking options for those who insisted on driving.

Expo organizers did find room for about 20,000 parking spots around the city, including the paved-over Interbay landfill, which cost more than $230,000 to convert. Booths were built to sell fair tickets, and buses would be on hand to ferry attendees to Seattle Center. Even pet care was available for those who couldn’t leave their dogs and cats at home.

Interbay could accommodate 5,000 cars, yet on opening day less than 100 fair-goers pulled in. Weeks later the fair’s general manager counted just nine cars in the lot. What happened? While Morton hadn’t overestimated the number of drivers, he had failed to consider the entrepreneurial spirit of local residents who paved their own private lots to make a buck. By July 4, Interbay shut down entirely, but not before parking one more vehicle: the Goodyear Blimp.

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Image: The Seattle Public Library

Peter Canlis was nervous. “Dad told us about how this grand new restaurant spinning in the sky was going to take our business,” his son Chris Canlis recalls. Peter even considered building a new Canlis on the Seattle Center campus. Chris was 15 in 1962; today he’s owner emeritus of the family restaurant now run by his sons—a restaurant that remains, shall we say, impervious to competition. Spinning or otherwise.

Thanks to the World’s Fair, the city was on the culinary landscape. “Suddenly the world discovered Seattle,” Canlis says. “Till then I think people thought we lived in tents and teepees.” It also led to Seattle’s propensity for using its restaurants to prove itself to the world—a propensity that would ultimately lead to the development of the culinary genre everyone loves but no one can define: Northwest Cuisine.

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The Needle Builder
Paul Collop was a builder, not a writer. He said so in his first column in The Seattle Times—“This writing dodge isn’t exactly my line,” he began—but the construction boss was soon waxing poetic about the Space Needle he was erecting. The Pacific Car and Foundry superintendent called it “this yellow Tower of Babel” and “a big praying mantis inside its cocoon.”

FACES OF THE FAIR

Jay Rockey

Public Relations

Then When public relations director Jay Rockey saw the partly built Space Needle on the cover of Life magazine, he knew the fair would be big. Rockey secured a second Life cover in addition to multiple placements on the up-and-coming medium of television. Eighteen months earlier Rockey had been offered the position of public relations director when he stopped by the fair office to see his friend who held the job. Explaining that his friend had just quit, an apologetic receptionist suggested Rockey meet fair director Ewen Dingwall who insisted Rockey fill the post.

Now The Rockey Company grew to become the local benchmark for public -relations, with offices in Seattle, Portland, and Spokane.

Soon Collop was getting fan mail for his weekly installments; Seattle ate up the updates on ring girders and the complaints that women visitors at the job site distracted his men, who “all stopped work to look.” Mostly he bemoaned the weather; poor conditions halted progress, and he was building the 600-foot structure in winter—a Seattle winter at that. The Needle was completed just in time, opening a month before the fair with construction debris still on site.

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Rejected Fair Ideas
Ways to promote the fair, as reported by The Seattle Timestwo weeks prior to opening day:

“Pouring crude oil into the crater of Mount Rainier and lighting it as a torch”

“Drop an expendable automobile from the top of the Space Needle”

“Walk an elephant from Denver to Seattle by way of Los Angeles”

“Have a camel ride up and down the Space Needle elevator”

“Launch and retrieve an astronaut in Seattle for the opening of the fair”

“Have a Harlem Globetrotter try to shoot a basket from the top of the Needle”

“Float a Goddess of Liberty statue in Puget Sound”

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The Space Needle Napkin
On a 1959 visit to Germany, World’s Fair Commission chairman Eddie Carlson saw Stuttgart’s concrete Fernsehturm tower and imagined one for Seattle. His napkin sketch of such a steeple—a doodle he recreated in the 1980s—was the basis for the Space Needle design.

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The Main Event

Image: The Seattle Public Library

The Fair Comes to Life
Called the Gayway—yes, titter away at the name—the fair’s midway would later morph into the Fun Forest. The U.S. Science Pavilion became the Pacific Science Center. Food concessions were located in the old armory that became Center House, itself about to transform again. The Sky Ride air tram spanned Century 21 and operated into the 1980s, when it was moved to the Puyallup fairgrounds.

Tour the fairgrounds:

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Image: Bettmann / Corbis

JFK Opens the Fair from Florida
Just before 3pm on Saturday, April 21, 1962, President John Kennedy, in a blue pinstripe suit, scissored across a beachfront manse in Palm Beach, Florida, where he was enjoying Easter weekend, and sat before a telegraph key and a telephone to deliver the opening speech for Century 21. His words—the vowels extra long, the final Rs complete no-shows—poured from speakers at the fairground stadium and over the eardrums of some 12,000 spectators: “I am honored to open Seattle’s World’s Fair today. What we show was achieved with great effort in the fields of science, technology, and industry.” He reached for the telegraph key linked to a Navy radio telescope in Maryland, which zeroed in on a radio wave emanated from Cassiopeia A, a supernova 11,000 light years away. The president pressed a gold button on the telegraph and the star’s faint signal brought the fairgrounds to life. Bells chimed. The Space Needle’s rotating restaurant spun. The International Fountain erupted. And party balloons floated up from the stadium like bubbles in a champagne glass. Century 21 had begun.

Watch President Kennedy open the fair:

FACES OF THE FAIR

Gene Gentry McMahon

Van de Kamp Girl

Then As the Van de Kamp Girl representing the well-loved Seattle bakery, dressed in a Dutch blue dress, white apron, and cap, Gene Gentry McMahon would climb a stairway to the top of a 25,000-pound fruitcake that towered above the Food Circus floor and slice off free samples to share with thousands of visitors passing through. She still wonders who snitched to her boss that she ate more than she handed out. The tattling wasn’t necessary, confesses McMahon, whose waistline grew by 20 pounds that summer.

Now A successful Seattle painter and art teacher, McMahon’s work includes a 10-by-35-foot enamel mural in the bus tunnel’s Westlake station.

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Jet Crash in the ’Burbs
On April 21, a plane crash dampened the opening-day revelry after a fairground flyby went bad. The engines on an Air Force F-102 flamed out and the pilot safely parachuted into Lake Washington, but the jet’s impact killed two residents in Mountlake Terrace.

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The Home Of Tomorrow, Yesterday
With its modern living exhibit, General Electric tried to forecast the world to come. “I remember it had a closet that you would hang up your dry cleaning in, and the closet would dry clean your clothes,” says the fair’s director of film and television, Albert Fisher.

FACES OF THE FAIR

Tomio Moriguchi

Vendor

Then Tomio Moriguchi’s father Fujimatsu, patriarch of Uwajimaya Grocery, decided to open a 700-square-foot retail space at the fair. Cigarettes were the big seller, along with Japanese fans and other souvenirs. Sadly, Fujimatsu passed away that summer, but the experience of the fair opened the door to new markets and gave Tomio the impetus to leave his steady engineering job at Boeing to take over the family business.

Now Since 1962, Uwajimaya has expanded steadily, moving twice from storefronts on South Main Street to its current Uwajimaya Village. It is the largest Japanese American grocery in the Northwest, employing 400 people in four stores.

The full-scale model house was packed with electric miracles of the future touted by GE, including a push-button electric sink and an at-home computer that could track a household’s banking and grocery shopping. Today a local company that built its fortune on just such a computer continues imagining the home of the future. Since 1994, Microsoft has operated its own full-scale home on its Redmond campus, prototyping the still-in-development technology that, in the words of the official Century 21 program, is “consigned for delivery in the world of tomorrow.”

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Boeing Wants You
With science geeks flocking to Boeing’s backyard in 1962, the fair seemed like the perfect venue for Seattle’s aerospace outfit to recruit new talent. The company ran newspaper ads almost daily for its career booth near the Science Pavilion, promising “unique ground-floor opportunities” on futuristic projects like the Air Force–funded Dyna-Soar, a Space Shuttle–like glider.

The only problem? The Seattle economy in general swooned postfair. After adding a record 10,900 jobs between March and April 1962, the city’s economy tanked in ’63, with Boeing shedding 15,000 employees. And it only got worse that December when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara killed the Dyna-Soar before its first flight. Boeing recovered, of course, but not without having to watch competitor—and future acquisition—McDonnell Douglas get props for engineering NASA’s Gemini program.

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The Queen of Show Street
“Hello, suckers!” That was how Gracie Hansen greeted the crowd every night on Show Street, the adult section of Century 21. The Morton, Washington, native’s girlie and variety show was the biggest attraction. “Gracie said, ‘Astronauts like space, but they also need sex and cotton candy,’ ” says biographical playwright Don Horn. Besides Gracie Hansen’s Paradise, Show Street’s slightly seedy corner included adult puppets from Sid and Marty Krofft and a peep show.

Hansen was a kind of latter-day Mae West, who despite her diminutive height was a commanding presence in her furs and baubles. “She wore a lot of jewels, and she liked feathered things,” says longtime friend Gordon Malafouris. “She’d say, ‘What I can’t wear, I’ll carry.’ ” Before the show’s topless showgirl bits and vaudeville acts, she’d pop up on the Paradise stage to do some stand-up and a rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” She kept it cleaner than her image, says Malafouris: “She never used vulgar or dirty words.”

Image: Post-Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History and Industry

Seattle residents largely tolerated the adult entertainment of Show Street, though there were the usual angry letter writers and one fully nude performance only lasted a few nights. The racy attractions underwent a midfair retooling, and at one point Hansen’s own show was better known for barks than boobs. “It was the thing that saved her show for a while—people came to see Louie the Dog,” says Horn. “She said, ‘I can’t believe the dog stole the act when I have topless women!’ ”

Despite her (mostly) clean living, Hansen cultivated a naughty image and didn’t correct people who called her a madam. After the fair she continued to produce racy stage shows in Portland and eventually ran for governor of Oregon—coming in a respectable third. Her star grew during the fair, but her coffers didn’t; she lost money on her show, and titillation never outperformed the science exhibits. Despite her best efforts, says Horn, Hansen didn’t quite live up to her claim to “save the fair from science.”

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Image: The Seattle Public Library

The Belgian Waffle Invasion
Thanks to an enterprising man named Walter Cleyman, Seattle—heck, America—got its first taste of Belgian waffles in 1962. Though they would garner more national attention during the ’64 New York fair, the Euro noshes were introduced stateside at our expo. Cleyman traveled here from his native Belgium (waffle irons in tow) to shill from two stands, one a twee chalet on the Gayway.

“I’m probably like everybody else,” recalls the fair’s special events director Louis V. Larsen. “I don’t think I’d ever heard of a Belgian waffle before.” Then-novel toppings of strawberries and whipped cream, not to mention the complex crispiness of the waffles, would send eaters over the moon. (An “uncultured” customer could request syrup, reported Spokane Daily Chronicle.) “This unusual smell that nobody had smelled before penetrated the air,” recalls Seattleite Marie McCaffrey, an 11-year-old at the time.

Of all the fair’s far-flung delicacies—the Mongolian steak sandwiches, the Argentinean beef—Cleyman’s imports proved the runaway hit. To wit, strawberries occasionally ran out, at which point workers plucked pineapple from fellow food slingers. Newspaper reports have Cleyman pocketing more than $350,000 after churning out half a million treats.

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Welcome, Avant-Garde
The Beatles had yet to cross the pond, but there was a serious cultural invasion happening at Century 21, with fairgoers practically tripping over folk dancers from the Philippines and theater troupes from Korea and Japan. Of all the colorful international performers, French filmmaker Jean Herman snagged headlines with his untitled, “downbeat” four-and-a-half-minute film: “a montage of fast and frenetic photographs” of a chaotic modern city, wrote New York Times reporter Bosley Crowther. There were shots of rock bands and crowded city sidewalks, bra ads and models in stages of undress. Reactions were mixed. “The decidedly cynical implication, no matter how amusing it may be to more sophisticated viewers, seems to come as a considerable surprise amid all the progressive, upbeat, and forward-looking implications of the fair,” he wrote.

FACES OF THE FAIR

Nils von Veh

New Citizen

Then With the fairgrounds as a backdrop, Nils von Veh and his family were sworn in as American citizens on July 4, 1962. They had fled Austria over concern of Soviet expansion in 1957, the year of Sputnik. The Seattle Times captured the event, with a photo of his mother in her native Croatian dress, and the story is part of family lore.

Now The naturalization ceremony has been held on July 4 ever since at Seattle Center. Von Veh ran the Seven Gables movie theatres after serving as program director for KZAM radio.

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Notable Century 21 Visitors

Igor Stravinsky conducted the Seattle Symphony Orchestra at the opening of the Opera House on opening day.

Richard Nixon, then an ex–vice president and candidate for governor of California, visited with his wife, Pat.

Bob Hope performed at the Aqua Theatre, where overflow seats were in rowboats floating in Green Lake.

Bill Gates was just six when he attended the fair; it could have been the first time he saw a computer.

Lassie, the dog star of the eponymous show, also visited the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital.

Prince Philip piloted his own plane into Seattle.

Robert F. Kennedy spoke before a packed house and his children tried the rides on the Gayway.

Sammy Davis Jr. got raves for his revue at the Orpheum.

The Shah of Iran and his wife appeared on the second day of the fair, insisting on mingling with the crowds they attracted.

Walt Disney came to see how the fair adapted the crowd-control lessons of his own Disneyland.

Carl Sandburg read a selection of his poems on the fair’s closing day.

Count Basie reportedly complained about the acoustics during his fair performances, according to fellow arena headliner Benny Goodman.

Joan Baez, considered to be on the rise as a folk singer, took the stage at the Playhouse.

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The Crime Wave That Wasn't
It was supposed to be a pickpocket’s paradise—a sea of distracted humanity blinking at the marvels of the modern world, leaving billfolds and purses exposed for thieves to pluck. The Seattle Police Department dispatched 50 officers, which bolstered Century 21’s army of about 200 security guards. A total of 325 larcenies were reported—far below police predictions. Citywide, the biggest spike in crime was the plundering of parked cars (an activity that increased at least 100 percent over the previous year). But hardly a wallet or handbag ever left a fairgoer’s side. SPD told The Seattle Times that 16 pockets were reportedly picked in one day, but 14 of the wallets ended up in lost and found “with the money still in them.”

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Image: Puget Sound Regional Branch Washington State Archives, Century 21 Exposition/Cr14416

Christine Graham, age seven, was the fair’s four-millionth visitor on July 13, 1962.

By the Numbers
Duration April 21–October 21, 1962
Fair Admission Adults $2, children $1
Space Needle Admission Adults $1, children 75¢
Out-of-State Visitors to Seattle 7 million
Attendance 9,696,936
Fair Income $23 million

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Image: Albert Fisher

It Happened to Albert Fisher
It’s the sort of thing you expect to see in, well, an Elvis Presley movie. Bright-eyed 20-year-old leaves his native New Orleans and, wham, the kid’s BFFs with the King himself. In 1962, Albert Fisher scored a job as director of TV and movies for the fair, which meant he rubbed elbow patches with the likes of Candid Camera’s Alan Funt, talk show host Merv Griffin, and newsman Walter Cronkite—all of whom filmed TV specials at the fair. And when Elvis Presley arrived in September to film It Happened at the World’s Fair (a musical that finds the King on the monorail, in the Space Needle, and fleeing security guards across the fairgrounds), Fisher and the singer struck up a friendship.

When local shooting wrapped, Elvis invited Fisher to Los Angeles to consult on the film—basically to make sure the sets looked like the Seattle World’s Fair. The opportunity resulted in a lifelong career in television and film. “Meeting Elvis and working on that film changed my life,” says Fisher, today a producer in Hollywood.

“We actually went on a couple of double dates while in Seattle. I was dating a Scottish girl at the time.” Elvis bought out the two back rows of the now-demolished Music Hall theater and he and his entourage—Fisher and the Scot in tow—slipped in after the film began and exited just before it ended, avoiding the notice of rabid fans. The film? Kid Galahad, starring Elvis Presley.

Rock out with Elvis in the trailer for It Happened at the World’s Fair:

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Peaceful Protests
On May 5, while fair attendees fantasized about life in the twenty-first century, 400 peaceniks staged a protest, but it was a far cry from the WTO rioters who would storm Seattle nearly four decades later. Repping groups like the Unitarians for Social Justice and Seattle Women Act for Peace, they called for an end to nuclear arms testing while marching calmly from City Hall to the fairgrounds.

Not only was it drama-free, the protest was the lone high-profile act of defiance during the fair’s run—unless you want to include the letters sent to Century 21 offices pooh-poohing a rumored visit by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

• • • • • • • • • •

The Cold War and Godless Communists
“I did not detect either angels or gods” in space, said Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov at his World’s Fair press conference. In the midst of the Cold War, his statements toed the atheist line of the USSR: “I don’t believe in God. I believe in man.” That stopped the presses.

Titov’s routine photo op instantly became a Cold War battleground, and Sharon Lund Friel of the fair’s press headquarters remembers the flap it caused: “It was offensive. But at the same time, some people were very suspicious of Russia. It was just the era we were living in,” she says.

Though Century 21 was a fair that revolved around the space age, Titov’s deity dis was only softened by American astronaut John Glenn four days later; he said, “The God I pray to is not small enough that I expected to see him in outer space.” It was the Cold War’s biggest mark on the fair—until the Cuban Missile Crisis coincided with closing day in October.

FACES OF THE FAIR

Jeff Brotman

Concession Worker

Then As a “worker bee” for his father Bernie, who ran the apparel sales concession at the fair, Jeff Brotman kept the retail kiosks buzzing and stocked with umbrellas and ponchos during the fair’s soggy first weeks. A UW student at the time, he would hook up after work with the employee organization, where he got to know workers from around the world and was inspired to see their countries for himself. On a trip years later Brotman encountered a European model of retailing—a combination discount supermarket and department store—and the idea of Costco was born.

Now Brotman opened the first Costco warehouse in Seattle in 1983. This year Costco expects to have 600 stores and do almost $100 billion in sales.

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Image: The Seattle Public Library

Brave New Fashions
Scan any crowd shot taken at the World’s Fair and beam with sartorial pride. Not even the kids wore jeans. And Vogue magazine sponsored thrice-daily shows at the Fashion Pavilion just east of the Needle. For $16 a day, local and regional models stepped out in pointy-toe rain boots, Norwegian-style jacquard sweaters, and, as one fashion journalist put it, “man-made wonder fabrics, science’s gift to modern women.”

Georgia Gellert, one of only two female expo executives—and the one in charge of fashion happenings—told a reporter that the imperative was to show visitors “why the American woman is the best dressed woman in the world.” But she might have secretly wanted to persuade the world that it was the Seattle woman, specifically, who was the best dressed and most elegant of them all. Gellert coaxed Mademoiselle and Town and Country into running World’s Fair fashion spreads. The latter gave 30 pages to Seattle’s brave new world: knife-pleated wool skirts, French ottoman knits, and elbow-gloved socialites.

In one image Lee Milburn, then a 21-year-old model and aspiring stockbroker, wears a structured Christian Dior coat in orange brushed wool from the Frederick and Nelson department store; in another, her own wasp-waisted coatdress from John Doyle Bishop, the most dashingly put-together couturier of the day.

View a slideshow of space-age fashions from Town and Country magazine, August 1962.

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FACES OF THE FAIR

Ron Sher

Bubbleator Operator

Then “Step to the rear of the sphere,” intoned Ron Sher, dressed in a Jetsons-style silver lamé uniform (below), as he guided an unending line of fair visitors into the popular Bubbleator. This spherical elevator of acrylic glass brought 100 passengers at a time through the Washington State Pavilion (now KeyArena) to the World of Tomorrow exhibit. Sher had come from Colorado, lured by the adventure of a summer job. What was worth a long wait for thousands became drudgery for a college student, and after just three weeks, Sher hung up his silver suit and headed to Alaska.

Now The developer of Crossroads Mall and Third Place Books, Sher works to create livable urban areas.

Jobs for (Pretty) Women
What did it take to push the Space Needle elevator buttons in 1962? Apparently you needed to be tall, young, and hot. “Operators and starters must be at least five-six, good-looking and between 20 and 35,” The Seattle Times reported. It went without saying that these eye-pleasers were women, sometimes described in the newspaper by weight and hair color. Sounds about right, says anyone who’s seen Mad Men.

Not all the requirements were for aesthetics, says Louise Threadgill, who booked 7,356 skyward trips during her tenure as elevator operator: “You had to be tall because they wanted you to be able to see above the crowd.”

Aside from the “pretty” requirements over at the Space Needle, fair employment was a boon to most young women, says HistoryLink historian Paula Becker. Sharon Lund Friel, who despite being only 22 years old, held a management position in the press office, noticed how the fair was being spun. “For men there’s the science center, and for women there was the fashion pavilion,” she says. “We were right on the cusp of the women’s movement. We accepted a lot of things without saying, ‘Jeez, they’re not talking about the waist size of the man I’m working right next to.’ ” Still, she had no problem managing a staff of male press aides.

Of the hundreds of people honored during the six-month fair, says Becker, most of the women highlighted were beauty queens. “If you visited the fair and your name was mentioned [in the press], you probably had a crown on your head,” she says.

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Guess Man
Walter Straley, president of Pacific Northwest Bell, had a lot of confidence in the future. In April 1962, just before the fair, he offered The Seattle Times a projection of what the region would look like by the twenty-first century. He predicted four bridges would stretch across Lake Washington (nope) and one across Puget Sound (nada) and a monorail “between Tacoma and Everett, looping around Lake Washington” (we wish). But what Straley lacked in transportation prognostication he aced in forecasting human fertility. He predicted that the nine counties comprising the Puget Sound region—at the time home to a measly 1.7 million—would have a combined population of 4.3 million. According to the 2010 census, it’s 4,372,392.

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Image: Rob Wilson/Shutterstock

NYC Doesn't Heart Seattle
We’ll just assume the Big Apple was suffering from prefair jitters—the city was gearing up for its 1964 world expo—because something has to explain the acrimony it seethed toward us in ’62. Kenneth Keating, U.S. Senator from New York, fired the first salvo months before the Seattle fair opened when he declared Century 21 “small time.” Later, media personality Dorothy Kilgallen piled on with the prediction that “nobody would drive across the country just to see some science exhibits,” The New York Times reported.

Kilgallen was wrong, of course. And her city would soon feel the pain, especially when it came to profits. “New York nitery operators have found something new to worry about,” Variety reported in June 1962. “Latest figures on advance party bookings indicate summer business will drop an estimated 25 percent because of the increasing draw of Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition.”

While some Empire Staters eventually came around—The New York Times published a handful of travel stories recommending the fair—other NYC media outlets dogged Century 21 organizers till the end. “They’re fighting like crazy in Seattle,” groused Emily Genauer of the Herald Tribune.

Paul Thiry, lead architect of the fair, cried foul and suggested, according to The Seattle Times, that “the attempt to represent what has been ‘a heartwarming experience in cooperation’ as a battle royale among designers in Seattle is a New York ‘attitude,’ nourished by its own protective contemplation of the 1964 fair scheduled there.”

New York dropped the hate as its own event drew closer, but it may have had reason to feel threatened. While that city’s exposition was “four times the size and had a much more international feel than Seattle’s,” says Albert Fisher, who served as TV and film director for both fairs, “Century 21 has had a longer lasting, more visible legacy. New York has little to show for its fair today, but Seattle’s fair changed the city.”

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Million Dollar Display
It’s not uncommon to spot Space Needle–festooned frosted tumblers at mod stores around Seattle, but drinking vessels were just a slice of the ephemera on offer at the fair. Charms, ashtrays, whiskey decanters, medals, stamps, and coins all bore logos or scenes of the expo. Those looking to collect the coins found them at the Million Dollar Display. The name isn’t hyperbole—the attraction housed a million silver pieces minted in the early 1900s. Numismatists could purchase a nine-piece set of bronze or silver medallions for $28.50 and $112.50, respectively. Today complete collections fetch around $175 and $500.

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The Beam Up
Images from the fair were part of the first-ever live television broadcast between the United States and Europe. The pan-Atlantic broadcast, on July 23, 1962, featured 90 seconds of scenes from the fair, recalls Albert Fisher, Century 21’s TV and film director. The images bounced off Telstar 1, a satellite slingshot into the atmosphere days earlier. “The world,” says Fisher, “was really watching us then.”

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FACES OF THE FAIR

Stan McDonald

Rickshaw Entrepreneur

Then A businessman with a knack for moving people, Stan McDonald imported a fleet of 20 bicycle-powered rickshaws from Taiwan, marking the first time these conveyances were ever used in North America. The pedicab reached stardom when Elvis’s costar Joan O’Brien pedaled the King in the film It Happened at the World’s Fair. McDonald’s idea for getting people to the fair via a floating hotel from San Francisco sparked plans for a new business venture.

Now In 1965, McDonald formed Princess Cruise Lines, which he expanded to become one of the largest cruise lines in the world.

Imbiber's Dilemma
In light of Seattle’s strict liquor laws, the city’s restaurateurs had to make it easier for a visitor to get a drink. A campaign to allow liquor sales on Sundays gained momentum but didn’t succeed. So an underground economy thrived instead, recalls El Gaucho owner Paul Mackay. Drink-seeking visitors to Seattle soon learned that a hotel bellman or taxi driver was a reliable source of booze on Sundays or late at night.

In 1962, 21-year-old Mackay recalls that servers at bars and restaurants moved through dining rooms on Saturday nights, plucking cocktails and glasses of wine out of customers’ hands, before the stroke of midnight signaled the Sunday morning ban. “It created the kind of atmosphere where people drank incredibly because they knew at midnight it was over,” he recalls.

The hospitality industry’s ire at not being able to serve fairgoers on Sundays helped inspire the repeal of the Sunday Sabbath–keeping “blue laws” starting in 1966.

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Accidental Flashers
Among the vertigo-inducing amusements on the Gayway: the Wild Mouse mini rollercoaster, bumper cars, and, perhaps most unforgettable, the Rotor. For 35 cents a pop, Rotor riders—one Robert F. Kennedy, who visited the fair in early August, among them—stood against the inside wall of an enormous barrel, which, once it began spinning, pinned passengers to its surface via centrifugal force. After several dizzying rotations, the Rotor slowed to a stop and riders slid downward. Their clothes didn’t always immediately slide with them. For women in skirts or dresses, recalls the fair’s director of special events Louis V. Larsen, this meant an unintended peep show as they nearly slipped out of their garments. The phenomenon attracted many an impish fairgoer. Not that that’s why Kennedy took a ride.

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Image: Raimund Koch/Corbis

The Legacy

The Monorail Campaign
You didn’t ride a monorail to work this morning, right? What was supposed to be the “transportation of the future” is now the tourist trap of the past, Seattle’s coolest Jetsons-style attraction. It was at first a financial success: The $3.5 million system recouped its cost before the fair was shuttered. But when, during the fair, the city got to vote on turning it into a citywide system, Seattle turned it down.

Flash forward to 1997. Cab driver Dick Falkenbury posted a sign that read, “Extend the Monorail,” at the corner of Broadway and John Street, then watched a driver park his bus and exit just to sign the attached petition. “People were so ready to sign,” he says. “It’s the only transportation system that actually works,” he adds. “Since it’s been built, after several earthquakes, we’ve never had to so much as realign the rails.” Indeed, after half a century, the train has long outlasted Germany’s now-defunct Alweg company that built it.

Falkenbury’s petitions—one of which gathered 18,000 signatures with just $2,100 in funds, he says—led to a series of initiatives and, eventually, the Seattle Monorail Authority, which collapsed in 2008 after spending $124.7 million in taxpayer funds and building nothing. Seattleites had become increasingly wary of costs and the towering tracks. “Maybe they grew up with parents who disliked this monorail intrusion upon Fifth Avenue back in 1962,” says German Alweg expert Reinhard Krischer, whose mechanical engineer father was one of three to build Seattle’s monorail.

University of Washington historian John Findlay calls the train a “spectacular failure” instead of the revolutionary rapid transit system it was meant to be: “That was a dream,” he says. “It’s kind of a toy.”

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We Got Cultured
By the time the fair was over, the 74-acre campus was primed for a cultural renaissance. The Civic Auditorium with its “barnlike interior” had been gutted and refurbished as a 3,500-seat opera house fit for the likes of Igor Stravinsky; across the way, the new 800-seat playhouse (now Intiman Playhouse) cried out for its own theater company. So once the fair’s gates shut for good on October 21, 1962, the city set about creating Century 21 Center Inc., an organization of civic leaders that, along with Allied Arts, would transform the fairgrounds into the arts and entertainment hub it is today.

Before the year was up, two new opera companies—Western Opera and Seattle Symphony’s opera arm—were clamoring to take advantage of the stately new venue. Rather than bleed each other dry, they merged to become Seattle Opera under director Glynn Ross. Four years later, it was one of the three most prolific opera companies in the U.S. (topped only by the Met and New York City Opera). Meanwhile, Allied Arts’ Robert Block and Bagley Wright, then-chair of Century 21’s performing arts committee, went stumping in New York City, looking for a director to lead a year-round professional theater company. A repertory company—with its large ensemble of actors—was like signing up for bankruptcy, but their risk paid off: In 1990, Seattle Repertory Theatre added “Tony-winning regional theater” to its tagline.

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FACES OF THE FAIR

George Tsutakawa

Sculptor

Then Although his proposal for the International Fountain wasn’t chosen, George Tsutakawa was asked to design the commemorative medal for the fair. It was a demanding commission, requiring him to travel to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia where the medal was struck. A copy of the cast, its stylized 1950s design proclaiming “Space Age World’s Fair,” was later set within the Founders’ Court near Intiman Theatre. Fittingly, his son Gerry’s Fountain of Seseragi is located just steps away.

Now George Tsutakawa’s first fountain built for a public space, Fountain of Wisdom, is located in front of the downtown library. Gerry’s work includes the nine-foot high bronze mitt in front of Safeco Field.

Expos Go Green
As the name implied, Century 21 was all about blasting into the future, rather than preserving, or conserving, the past. Fairground construction felled blocks of old buildings, including an elementary school and a former fire station. Visitors marveled at General Motors’ fuel-chugging Firebird III powered by a gas-turbine engine, as well as a host of household-of-the-future devices that made liberal use of energy or disposable plastics.

In 1970, Earth Day was established. A year later Spokane’s delegation submitted bills to the state legislature seeking help in pursuing a world’s fair of their own. The bill’s introduction stated, “In the almost 10 years that have elapsed since Century 21, man’s place in nature and his relation to his environment has become the most critical concern of our state and nation.”

Spokane’s Expo ’74 was the first to have a conservation theme, “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh New Environment.” While the Space Needle recast Seattle’s former skyline, Spokane’s fair was held on reclaimed industrial grounds. The event also celebrated the newly restored Spokane Falls, a roaring reminder of the Northwest’s more rugged days.

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Seemed Like A Good Idea
While Century 21 is widely regarded a success—it’s one of the few World’s Fairs in history to have paid for itself—not everyone involved came out on top. There was Spanish Village, a Spain-themed pavilion funded by Wallingford businessmen that went bankrupt, and Indian Village, a mock teepee encampment, the poor management of which left its temporary inhabitants even more destitute. On a smaller scale there were would-be entrepreneurs like Barbara Sharkey Smith, a first-time author who penned Seymour at the Seattle World’s Fair, about an anthropomorphic seagull (Seymour) whose gull’s-eye view of the expo was intended to appeal to kids. It didn’t. And when no one bought the book, Smith, a Capitol Hill mother of two, was stuck with 2,000 copies and was $1,400—about $10,000 today—in the hole. But, she told The Seattle Times, “A lot of people smarter than I took a much worse beating.”

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Image: Manny Millan/Getty

Seattle Got Its Sports Arena
It gave us the Pacific Science Center, the Fun Forest, the Opera House—thanks, World’s Fair. But Seattle got more than arts and science. At least six weeks before the fair’s opening day, architect Paul Thiry was already contemplating how to remodel the Washington State Coliseum from a home for the Bubbleator to an arena. In fact, plans for converting the “hyperbolic paraboloid” into a sports venue capable of luring a pro franchise had begun a year before the Howard S. Wright Construction Co. broke ground in 1960.

So on March 7, Thiry offered his own vision of a postfair coliseum: an 18,000-seat arena that could host indoor track, tennis, and boxing—although hockey, most agreed, would be the “star tenant and moneymaker.”

Thiry had a strong ally in Dorm Braman, who as a city council member had campaigned for reelection by promising to turn the Seattle Center grounds into “something all Seattle can enjoy and profit from for many generations to come.” Braman was so committed to the $5 million project that after ascending to the mayor’s office in 1964 he successfully lobbied city council for an additional $1 million. That June, after a modest six-week delay, the renovated coliseum opened. And as expected, the Seattle Totems’ semipro hockey team was the first tenant. Seats with the best sight lines went for $3.50.

Ironically it was an NBA exhibition game in October 1966 that would set the course for the future of the coliseum. Nearly 9,000 basketball fans showed up for the tilt—featuring Seattle U alumnus Elgin Baylor—and opened the league’s eyes to the possibility of fielding a team in the Emerald City. Two months later, NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy announced Seattle would be the home of its 11th franchise. That the SuperSonics would be stolen away by Oklahoma businessman Clay Bennett in 2008 makes Kennedy’s statement about the team’s owners all the more depressing: “We feel local representation is important to the success of the franchise.”

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Image: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections/Pearson 624-36

We Learned to Love Science
Since the World’s Fair was dedicated to “Man in the Space Age,” the U.S. Science Pavilion got prime real estate—more than six acres. Most visitors made it to the exhibits about space, the scientific method, and an introductory 10-minute film by designers Ray and Charles Eames. And according to science, the experiences changed attendees.

University of Washington sociologist James B. Taylor quizzed exiting pavilion visitors in an extensive study, finding changed attitudes. “Science came to be seen as more feminine, excitable, and warm,” he wrote. Optimism was in the air as fairgoers left increasingly believing in “the likelihood of science eliminating crime and poverty” and with a greater consensus about the likelihood of a lunar landing by 1980. Science may have given visitors warm fuzzies, but it was still, Taylor noted, fuzzy: “The public’s conception of science became more vague…the public did not increase in understanding of the scientific method,” he noted.

• • • • • • • • • •

The City Skyline Changed Forever
Seattle was already acquainted with modernist architecture when Century 21 began, but the Space Needle’s unprecedented curves and columns—along with the fairgrounds’ other modernist flourishes—cemented the city’s movement away from more traditional buildings, says Peter Steinbrueck, architect, former city council member, and son of the late Victor Steinbrueck, who codesigned the Needle. “We never turned back after that.” And because Seattle zoning laws tend to corral skyscrapers downtown, the Needle remains a stark standout on the north end.

The space-age fairground structures marked the last major collaborative effort among the region’s top architects—including Museum of History and Industry and Frye Art Museum designer Paul Thiry, and Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the Pacific Science Center. Cities are more likely to import big-name architects for major civic projects, notes Steinbrueck; the postviaduct redevelopment of the waterfront hasn’t gone to local contractors.

FACES OF THE FAIR

Minoru Yamasaki

Architect

Then In New York City, Seattle-born architect Minoru Yamasaki finished the architecture studies he started at the University of Washington. He shared his small apartment there, sheltering his parents from the internment forced upon Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II. Years later, Yamasaki earned the commission to design the U.S. Science Pavilion (now the Pacific Science Center). The graceful narrow gothic arches and serene plazas and fountains that came to define his work caught the eye of the New York Port Authority.

Now Beating out I. M. Pei and others, Yamasaki’s design was selected for the World Trade Towers and Plaza.

The Seattle World’s Fair in 2012

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Peter Steinbrueck

The Sea Center

Peter Steinbrueck
Architect and Design Consultant

Concept
“It’s the Sea Center—the name is kind of reminiscent of ‘Seattle Center,’ ” says Peter Steinbrueck of the edifice he imagines on the city’s waterfront. Atop what is currently the Washington State ferry docks, Steinbrueck sees a cultural center, transportation plaza, and city icon, all under one dramatic roof. It would complement the Space Needle that his father, Victor, helped design, but be more of a presence in city dwellers’ daily lives. “We’d expect millions of people to use this terminal,” he says. “It’s recalling sea animals and birds, and gives a soaring feel that is kind of uplifting—thinking positively about the future, as we have before.”

Structure
Its folded top evokes the curves of a surfacing blue whale and the wings of a seabird—much how the Sydney Opera House recalls a shell. “It’s intended to be a counterpoint to the towers behind it. Even, perhaps, luminescent,” he says. “I would love the whole building to be a glowing beacon. Like creatures in the sea, like jellyfish.” The window walls are inspired by a blue whale’s baleen, strung with wires that would resonate in the winds off Elliott Bay. On the deck a blue whale skeleton—Steinbrueck hasn’t said where he’d find such a thing—emphasizes Seattle’s link to sea life.

Transportation
Steinbrueck hasn’t forgotten about the car ferries that inhabit the space at present, but thinks they would be better served, trafficwise, at Pier 91. Meanwhile, the Sea Center would cater to commuters on foot: “It’ll have passenger ferries, high-speed ones that can travel at 50 miles per hour and carry hundreds of people from Olympia to Port Angeles, more efficiently and in less-polluting ways. They’d be boats that are built right here in the Northwest, recalling the mosquito fleet of the past.” Floatplanes and a waterfront tram system would make the spot a “multimodal transportation hub.”

Culture
The Sea Center’s water-facing decks would be home to a longboat canoe that celebrates Seattle’s native tradition. “It’s pretty shameful that we don’t have a comprehensive Northwest Indian museum or cultural center in Seattle to speak of, and this could be that,” he says. The shores of Seattle were once summer fishing villages, he notes, and a museum could both draw tourists and encourage commuters to linger.

Image: Kyle Johnson

The Food: Vegetable Caviar

Tom Douglas
Chef and Restaurateur

Concept
“The World’s Fair is about surprising people, having some fun with food,” says Tom Douglas. “But it’s quite hilarious to think that Belgian waffles were the food of the future back in the ’60s.” In 2012, he imagines, we’d serve Douglas fir “caviar.”

His idea of vegetable caviar comes largely from Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine cookbook. “There’s bound to be no caviar in our future except farm raised, so vegetable versions are a fun way to explore different flavors,” says Douglas. And, of course, these orbs of veggie essence will be sourced from local farms. “Now that’s an expectation. I don’t think people even think about it…they just assume it.”

Preparation
Brock Johnson, head chef at Douglas’s Dahlia Lounge, showed us how veggie caviar would be served: as green gel globules of Douglas fir heaped on an oyster. “Tastes like a Christmas tree,” Johnson says. The process is as futuristic as the Science Pavilion: Sodium alginate and tree-needle broth are dropped into a calcium chloride solution. Inside the outer shell, the broth stays liquid. The electric green color—think the shade on a Mariners uniform—comes from food coloring.

Johnson traces the oyster’s origin back to southern Hood Canal, “where these long fingers of water go out into the forest.” Chanterelles, too, would be locally foraged. The handheld treat is “the Northwest, distilled down into a single bite,” he says.

The Exhibits

John Findlay
Professor and Associate Chair of Pacific Northwest History, University of Washington

“Compared to the 1960s, a modern world’s fair would have a lot more life sciences. Seattle is a place for global health and public health. We have companies like Immunex or Dendreon, and companies that spun off from UW or the Hutch.”

Visionaries Imagine Seattle in 2062

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Miller Hull Partnership

The Sustainable City

By David Miller of Miller Hull Partnership, Codesigner of the Bullitt Center, the World’s Greenest Office Building

It’s entirely possible that in 50 years we could radically alter the infrastructure of Seattle. The proposal now for the waterfront is to have a more natural edge, a more natural shoreline. We could spread that idea through the city by dividing it into ecodistricts, which could utilize different kinds of technologies for capturing energy. Districts close to the water would tap tidal energy. Hilly districts could install turbines to make use of the groundwater flowing under the surface or in streambeds running through the city. Areas that have better access to sunlight could use photovoltaics, or solar panels.

There’s going to be fewer single-family houses. People say that Seattle is a single-family place, and that that’s the American way of life. I don’t buy it. A house can take many forms. We’ll build smaller with less and adapt our buildings to change. People will be able to put their kitchen together and a porch on their house themselves from parts traded from one household to the next. We’ll get rid of front yards, which are a waste of space, and have our living spaces right on the streets. Buildings like the Columbia tower could be opened up—just take down the outer walls on two or three floors to create open public space for winter gardens or urban agriculture.

We could reinstate natural waterways and let them flow down the streets and into Puget Sound. University Street would be a good one, with a cascade down the Harbor Steps. Devoted car corridors could be reduced—thanks to driverless cars. Drive your car to work and send it back to your wife, or send the kids to soccer games without you. —As told to Brian Colella

Image: Erik Lindbergh

Citizen Pilots

By Erik Lindbergh X Prize Foundation Board Member, Founder of Bainbridge Island–Based Lindbergh Electric Airplane Prize, and Grandson of Aviator Charles Lindbergh

The most promising potential in flight is electric propulsion. Once we solve the problem of energy density in batteries—that is, lighter weight batteries with similar power potential of fossil fuels—the possibilities really take off (pun intended).

We’ll be able to go to the local field, what will be called a pocket airport. This is an airport really close to your house, but no one is bothered by it because it doesn’t have giant jets flying in and out, creating noise and pollution. You hop into a quiet, electric-powered aircraft with vertical takeoff capabilities—and simple, single-lever power controls that make it easy for the average person to pilot. We’d fly across Puget Sound and all over the region. In fact, NASA already has a computer animation of what it calls the Puffin, which is a battery-operated, single-person aircraft. It’s pretty cool. And what that does is radically shift the way we think about moving about the planet.

Meanwhile, the commercial possibilities for space travel are huge. As we run out of terrestrial-based resources we could capture minerals from asteroids. And we could manufacture solar cells from lunar regolith—the dust on the moon—and collect energy 24/7 and beam it down to the earth, which has the potential of really reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Now all of these things may have issues with them. But there’s promise, theoretically, and we know there are huge problems with oil—we’re spilling oil in all the oceans, the oceans are sick. —As told to James Ross Gardner

Image: Dr. Leroy Hood

Disease Divination

By Dr. Leroy Hood DNA Sequencing Pioneer and President/Cofounder of the Institute for Systems Biology

The major breakthrough will be a new approach to medicine, which I call P4—predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. In 50 years, every human genome will be sequenced. So at birth, medical professionals will look into your genome, make predictions about where you’re going to have disease difficulties, and prescribe for each individual a unique health strategy. Moreover, in 50 years we will have a handheld device that, with a prick of your finger, will measure thousands of blood proteins, access all 50 or so of your major organ systems, and determine whether you are healthy or whether you’re starting to transition into disease.

In terms of optimizing wellness, you may be able to place a piece of tape on your chest that uses sensors to send information to a server and process it in real time. We’ll be able to react instantaneously to feedback and deal with disease at the very earliest stage rather than let it become full blown.

As a result, individuals will be productive and physically fit up until the end of their lives. I can imagine people in their 80s and 90s who are mentally alert, creative, fully productive citizens. That’s going to have incredible implications for society. We’ll have to rethink retirement, because people are going to find their jobs exciting and they are not going to be desperately wanting to retire to play golf. —As told to JRG

Seattle Center House Recycled

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Graham Baba Architects

“THIS PLACE IS LAYERED WITH CRUD,” JIM GRAHAM OF Graham Baba Architects said point-blank at his pitch for the makeover of the Seattle Center atrium food court last September. “This building started out as a 1939 armory. They drove tanks in the atrium during World War II. There was a rifle range in the basement. Let’s strip it back to its essence, search for its authenticity, and celebrate it.”

“The word celebrate was the aha! moment,” recalls Seattle Center director Robert Nellams. “The other firms pitching design proposals were all about covering up and hiding the building, marketing and signage. Graham Baba’s approach was, ‘You’ve got this funky old armory—let’s hug it to death.’ Jim knew we didn’t have the big money for the big gesture. So he told us, ‘When there is no money, you have to think.’ ”

Nellams knew to the penny just how little money there was to whip the dingy Center House food court into shape for the April 21 kickoff of the Next 50, the six-month-long series of festivities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1962 World’s Fair. The fact that Graham Baba’s thinking was more about demolition than construction—not so much less is more as less is everything—sealed the deal. “There were four firms pitching that afternoon,” says Nellams, “and three of them got the equivalent of hearty applause. For Jim Graham it was like a standing ovation.”

Jim Graham and his partner Brett Baba, both in their mid-40s, have been getting a lot of standing ovations of late for their architectural striptease. They transformed an old Capitol Hill garage into the Melrose Market (a mini mall of foodie shops anchored by the laid-back, locavore restaurant Sitka and Spruce) and recast Ballard’s century-old Kolstrand Building, a former marine supply place, as an inviting complex of brick-walled shops and restaurants (including Staple and Fancy Mercantile and the Walrus and the Carpenter oyster bar). Call it adaptive reuse.

Call it creative recycling. Call it adding by subtracting or design on the cheap for lean times. The architecture studio that Graham and Baba started five years ago is small, fresh, edgy, and young—but they have found success in turning cruddy old buildings into magical, minimalist urban spaces.

Now they’re peeling away decades of incrustations from the enormous, forlorn Center House atrium. To Graham the place “felt like the vacant concourse of an airport terminal.” A stage juts incongruously from the northeast corner; a big gap in the floor disgorges a display of fake trees from a subterranean wing of the Children’s Museum; the restaurants clustered along the north and east sides run the gamut from Subway to Orange Julius to Kabab; long sagging green and blue awnings on the upper walls war with cheery cheesy murals; stage lighting and beams from skylights half a football field overhead meld in a harsh unflattering glow.

There’s a lot of history not only in the building itself but in the ongoing struggle to update it. Duke Ellington played here with his band during a 1941 UW junior prom; a “Food Circus” with 52 internationally themed fast food concessions occupied the space during the World’s Fair; the Bubbleator connected the various levels before being put out to pasture; all manner of community groups still sing and dance on the atrium stage. But the interior itself is awkward, to put it mildly. Before they started planning the Next 50, the Seattle Center had commissioned local architecture firm SRG to come up with a master plan that called for a $250 million face-lift for the Center House, complete with a glass roof and a roof-level restaurant; a wall of windows on the south side would overlook the spot now designated for the Chihuly glass museum. In the fantasy sketches, the born again Center House looks like a crystal cathedral, an ethereal shrine to fun times. “We were dreaming but not crazy,” concedes Nellams. “Given the current fiscal situation, we scaled back the glass roof and the grand gesture. We’re still on the path to that vision, but we’re phasing it.”

In the current phase, seven openings have been cut into the concrete structure—the four on the west side will become big glass doors connecting the former food court area to outdoor seating on a new terrace overlooking International Fountain; three holes in the soaring bank of windows on the south side will let in more natural light and unify the facade. Levy Restaurants, a Chicago company that provides food and drink to sports stadiums and arenas, has been hired to “elevate food service offerings.” As of now, instead of the original $250 million dream budget, $4 million have been earmarked to “refresh and reshape” the atrium, and they have three months to do it.

{page break}

Image: Graham Baba Architects

Architectural Recycling From armory to Food Circus to Center House, and back to basics again.

“WE’RE DOING TRIAGE,” JIM GRAHAM TOSSES OFF AS HE strides through the Center House with Francesco Borghesi, one of the firm’s designers, a few weeks before demo is slated to begin.

Graham and Borghesi are on site to brainstorm the configuration of the two full-service restaurants that will anchor the food court. Actually, this is a doubling down of a brainstorming process that began last August when they submitted a preliminary proposal, continued through the formal pitch which won them the project in September, and acquired depth and detail at a series of design charrettes. “Look at these arched trusses,” says Graham, pointing to the atrium’s soaring steel skeleton. “Look how beautifully the rivets are articulated.”

Darting through a gap in the plastic sheeting that cordons off the ongoing construction on the west side, Graham runs his hand over the lumpy layer of fire retardant that was smeared over the lower third of these main trusses at some point in the building’s past. “If we could strip this off, you’d see how the truss comes down and lands on an elegant little point on the concrete slab.”

When viewed through Graham’s eyes, the space reveals surprising, muscular beauty: the austere geometry of window shape and roof pitch, no-nonsense raw concrete walls and end-grain wood floors, struts and trusses on an epic scale. It’s the beauty of simple functional things built to endure, and built cheap in tough times. But that beauty has vanished beneath the crud and clutter. Graham stares into the cacophony of murals, a chunk of the Berlin Wall, the old Frederick and Nelson clock, phones, and ATM hogging prominent floor space. “Where’s the visual hierarchy?” he wonders aloud. “Everything is clamoring for attention and yelling louder to be seen.”

Graham and Baba firmly believe that once they reduce the visual noise, conviviality will arise spontaneously out of the denuded, architecturally authentic space. It worked at Melrose Market, where the walls display no art, ducts and cables are exposed, cold brick and cement surround you—but somehow it’s a space you want to linger in, one that honors the integrity of materials, respects the ingredients at hand, and is open to tradition.

At the Center House, Graham and Baba plan to use the same recipe, only they’ll have to stretch it for a really big space, adding more light, more bodies (especially at night), clear decipherable signage—and some decent restaurants.

Borghesi is zeroing in on that last piece. The brother of the owner of Capitol Hill’s rustic-urbane pasta palace Osteria la Spiga (conveniently located right upstairs from Graham Baba’s office), the Italian-born Borghesi has a flair for inserting that ineffable something that makes people want to hang out in a restaurant or bar. His current task is to discern and then draw up plans that capture how the atrium will “feel” when the two anchor restaurants are in place on the south side.

“I’m thinking a bar here,” says Borghesi, waving his arms in the dusty boarded-up interior of the atrium’s southwest space. “And how about a takeout counter over there,” adds Graham, “where people coming in from the deck can grab a meal.” “It might be nice to expose the line,” interjects Borghesi—referring to the lineup of chefs at work. “And we’ll reorient the pizza oven so people can see it from the atrium.” “And a barrier here to define the outdoor seating area.”

With the demo date looming, there is still more dreaming than drawing, and the dreams are necessarily modest given the severe constraints on time and money. Graham is thinking one of the restaurants could be a brewpub catering both to families and young couples; the atrium’s west side, with its four bright new openings on the terrace and fountain, might be dotted with kiosks and food trucks offering regional and ethnic grab-and-go foods; there could be a demonstration kitchen where visitors sit and watch a rotating cast of chefs at work. “We want this to be a hub of activity,” says Graham, “a place that local people want to come back to, whether for a quick meal, picnic ingredients, or a sit-down dinner.”

Fifty years ago, when the 1962 World’s Fair opened its doors, people came here to celebrate—or at least peer into—the infinite promise of the future. But what exactly will the Next 50 be celebrating? Our fair city’s ingenuity and resilience? Its zest for continually reinventing itself? Its capacity to relish history without being wedded to the past? The challenge for Graham Baba is to coax any or all of these airy ideals out of an old clunky armory.

Fiction: Jim Lynch’s World’s Fair Tale, Truth Like the Sun

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Pascal Blanchet

The forthcoming novel Truth Like the Sun starts at the dawn of the Century 21 Exposition, then travels to the twenty-first century in the post-tech boom era. In an exclusive excerpt from the first chapter, fictional wunderkind Roger Morgan oversees opening night at the Space Needle. —The Editors

April 21, 1962

This is when and where it begins, with all the dreamers champagne-drunk and stumbling on the head of the Needle. Look back further all you want, but this renaissance starts right here when the dreamers get everyone to take one long gawk at this place. Look! Just, just look at this brash metropolis surrounded by postcard summits and all that boat-loving water. Up here in the dark, five hundred feet above it all, downtown looks like it’s on fire again, though it’s just showing off this time, flaunting cheap hydropower, everyone flipping on their lights to greet the world, all those bulbs straining to make the city look bigger than it actually is. Taste that salty air. Smell the clam spit. Where better to start afresh? A whole new way of living in a city of things to come. That’s right. A city so short on history it’s mostly all future anyway. So climb on board and go, go, go!

The elevator doors glide open seven minutes before midnight, everyone spilling out, men dressed like penguins, women like peacocks, an older crowd, bloodshot and slack-jawed, up past bedtime, bumping into radiant waitresses in gold lamé passing out flutes of champagne. Roger Morgan, the grand exalted dreamer himself, grabs a glass, thanks the waitress, takes in the chaos. Dozens of people—and it sounds like hundreds—are already here, seeing their city for the first time from this height, shouting, crowding the windows, exclaiming Good God! at the spectacle of lights and water below, while others marvel at how the dining area spins around the elevators and kitchen just slowly enough to make you think you’re losing your marbles. A busty woman returns from the bathroom and can’t find her friends, who’ve rotated eighty feet clockwise, until she hears them roaring at her confusion. A drink spills, a glass breaks, a man retches and blames it on the spinning. More shouts. More stampeding laughter.

Roger parts a gaggle, turning more heads—so damn young, isn’t he?—into another flurry of handshakes and hugs from people who’ve already embraced him tonight, but they want more contact now that they’re loaded and up in his Space Needle. Everybody wants his blessings, whether it’s the etiquette committee urging local ladies to wear dresses during the fair or the beautification committee telling school kids to keep those candy wrappers in their pockets. The fair’s coming! Clean the streets and shine your shoes. The fair is coming!

Roger continues grabbing shoulders and, depending on the recipient, offering one of his nimble smiles—gracious, mischievous, reassuring. Boyishly jug-eared, he comes off as a careful listener who agrees with you even while explaining why he doesn’t. Pushing words through his head now, he tries them out against this dizzy backdrop. Plan a toast all you want, but when the mood shifts you’d better adjust. “Every endeavor, big and small,” he whispers to himself, “begins with an idea.”

Where the hell is Teddy?

More overdressed drunks stumble out of the elevator into a fresh round of exclamations and squabbles over the exact whereabouts of various landmarks. Dapper men surround him. The only one he recognizes is Malcolm Turner, to whom he recently gave most of his savings. “Looks like the world’s your oyster,” a bullet-headed man tells him through a menacing smile. A camera flashes with each shake of his hand. Is that a Times photographer? It’s past midnight. Toasts were supposed to start already, but Roger knows when to stall. A meeting runs on schedule or tempers flicker, while a roast, a tribute, or any boozy gathering moves to a slower beat. You wait until they’re itching for someone to make sense of it all, then you wait a bit longer.

He hears Linda’s laugh, gauging her inebriation by its volume: plastered. He’d considered her gregarious before she’d wheedled him into proposing. Since then, she’s struck him as loud, especially when she drinks. He finds his mother, as far away from his fiancée as she can get, telling a story about her childhood that he knows isn’t true. He wraps an arm around her as if to brace her, though she’s probably the sturdiest woman up here, her sober regality as out of sync with this teetering mob as her fake British accent.

Teddy Severson strides over, tall, hipless, and lipless. “You ready?”

The sound system squeaks before Teddy’s throaty voice comes through louder than necessary. “Thanks for joining us.” Reporters set their champagne aside and flip open notebooks as everybody packs into this curve of the dining area. “Thanks for joining us,” he repeats over the lingering chatter, “on the eve of something that most people didn’t think was possible.” Laughter ripples, glasses clink, the city sparkles, a cigarette smolders toward his wedding band. “Along the way, I heard from enough doubters and doomsayers to make me forget that all we were trying to do was throw a nifty fair, not ruin this city.” Laughter mixes with gossipy murmurs. Everyone knows this crowd holds more than its share of doomsayers. “I too miss the quiet Seattle of yesteryear,” he continues woodenly, reading now, “but we can’t keep this place in curls and a Buster Brown suit much longer.” He blushes, waiting out the polite chuckles. “This city has done amazing things. It rose from ashes, flattened hills, dug canals, bridged lakes, and shipped its products to every major port. And for the next six months, it will, my friends, become the capital of the world.” He pauses, as if expecting more than golf claps. “But let me shut up and get Roger up here to christen this place up right, because without his gift of gab we wouldn’t be here, and we certainly couldn’t have coaxed thirty-five countries into helping us throw a fair in some city they still think rhymes with beetle.”

We built the tallest building west of the Mississippi, slapped a spinning restaurant on top, and lit the whole  damn thing on fire.

“Jus’ a few words,” Roger says to amuse those familiar with his rambling, noteless speeches. Easy to see in this light that he’s younger than everybody; loose limbed, bushy haired, dimpled. “First time I experienced this view,” he begins, “was when Teddy, Mr. Vierling, and I rented a helicopter and hovered up here to see what it might be like to actually have a restaurant in the sky.” Roger makes helicopter noises, then mimics the pilot. “‘Four hundred, four-fifty, five hundred feet. Holding.’ Teddy kept muttering, Jesus, while Mr. Vierling calculated aloud what it would cost to build this thing. The numbers, of course, kept going up, but it was obvious to all of us that this not only could happen, but needed to happen. So, what do you think? Pretty marvelous, huh?” Opening his arms, as if to hug everyone, he notices the county prosecutor, the city attorney, the police chief, two doomsaying councilmen, and the head of Boeing all studying him. While cameras flash, it occurs to him that he still doesn’t know the full price of the deals he’s struck and the friends he’s made.

“I’ve been warned that frankly we’re not sophisticated enough to pull this thing off, that we have a champagne appetite and a beer budget. Well,” he hoists his glass, “I disagree.”

His gratitude rattles on for five minutes without notes, thanking architects, contractors, and engineers by name. “All ambitious endeavors,” he says slowly now, “begin with a suggestion, a kiss, a daydream—whether it’s to build a freeway, a relationship, or a world’s fair.” He lowers his eyes and waits out the murmurs. “This unique building was put up in four hundred and seven days. It can take longer than that to remodel your kitchen, yet it’s already well on its way to becoming one of the world’s most recognizable icons.” He pauses, letting the words prick the bastards who want to tear it down after the fair. “We even put a forty-foot flame on top of it. That’s right. We built the tallest building west of the Mississippi, slapped a spinning restaurant on top, and lit the whole damn thing on fire. Sound smart?” He grins and shrugs. “I confess to having some moments of profound doubt. ‘What if this is the stupidest thing anybody’s ever tried?’ Look at us! Look at this audacity!” He steps back, inhales, then continues. “It’s amazing how many bad ideas we’ve had to overcome. Somebody suggested we fill Mount Rainier’s crater with oil and keep it burning through the fair. Another genius recommended that we tell NASA to land a rocket in Elliott Bay. Others offered conspiracy theories. The Committee Hoping for Extraterrestrial Encounters to Save the Earth—aptly nicknamed CHEESE—claims the Needle was designed to, and I quote, ‘send transmissions to beings in other solar systems.’” He cuts into the rising mirth. “Can I get a moment of silence here?” As the room settles, he takes everything in—the strange gleaming faces and lopsided chandeliers, the counterclockwise drift of the lights below, the bright-lipped brunette seemingly modeling ringless fingers for him. He waits a few more beats. “We are simultaneously at the end of something challenging and magnificent and at the beginning of something challenging and magnificent. So let’s commit this moment to memory, okay? Look around. Remember what our city looked like on this night from up here. Remember how young we all were.” He leans back to milk the laughter. “Remember this moment,” he insists, “before the eyes of the world take a good long look at us.”

Truth Like the Sun will be published by Knopf on April 10. Olympia author Jim Lynch will read at Elliott Bay Books on April 12.

Vintage Video from Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Rock out with Elvis in the trailer for It Happened at the World’s Fair:

Watch President Kennedy open the fair:

Tour the fairgrounds:

1962 World's Fair

Spring Arts 2012: Then and Now

Visual Art

The Making of a Sculpture

Classical & Dance

THEATER

Editor’s Picks

Exhibits & Festivals

Editor’s Picks

PUBLIC ART

Concerts

Editor’s Picks

1962 World’s Fair 50th Anniversary

The 1962 World's Fair: A Timeline

The Seattle World’s Fair in 2012

Visionaries Imagine Seattle in 2062

Seattle Center House Recyled

Fiction: Jim Lynch’s World’s Fair Tale, Truth Like the Sun

Spring Arts 2012: Then and Now

The 1962 World’s Fair: A Timeline

Faces of the Fair

Don Foster

International Exhibits

FACES OF THE FAIR

Jay Rockey

Public Relations

FACES OF THE FAIR

Gene Gentry McMahon

Van de Kamp Girl

FACES OF THE FAIR

Tomio Moriguchi

Vendor

FACES OF THE FAIR

Nils von Veh

New Citizen

FACES OF THE FAIR

Jeff Brotman

Concession Worker

FACES OF THE FAIR

Ron Sher

Bubbleator Operator

FACES OF THE FAIR

Stan McDonald

Rickshaw Entrepreneur

FACES OF THE FAIR

George Tsutakawa

Sculptor

FACES OF THE FAIR

Minoru Yamasaki

Architect

The Seattle World’s Fair in 2012

Visionaries Imagine Seattle in 2062

Citizen Pilots

Disease Divination

Seattle Center House Recycled

Fiction: Jim Lynch’s World’s Fair Tale, Truth Like the Sun

Vintage Video from Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair

PUBLIC  ART