The 1962 World's Fair: A Timeline

Photo: 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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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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Published: February 2012