The 1962 World's Fair: A Timeline

Photo: Courtesy The Seattle Public Library

The New Restaurant Scene

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.”

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 Times two 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.