5 Days In Seattle that Shook The World

Photo: Stephen Kaiser

THE BUILDUP

1982–November 28, 1999

KATHY SCHWARTZ

Sales Manager, Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau

The atmosphere in Seattle was heady in the ’90s, and we were cocky with success. The city was at the top of everyone’s list—best place to live, best place to work, cool, cool, cool. Boeing was America’s biggest exporter; a single plane made a significant difference in the trade deficit. Microsoft was cranking out millionaires, Nordstrom was everyone’s customer-service guru, and Starbucks was reinventing the neighborhood hangout. Frasier and his view of the Space Needle were on TV every week.

And we were recreating Seattle as an international convention destination.

It all started with the 1982 International Cancer Congress, which gave us a taste for these kinds of meetings. By 1988 we had a new convention center and new hotels. A meeting here was guaranteed good attendance. Seattle’s beauty, success, and hip allure had finally overcome the old obstacles of distance and weather.

Local governments and business groups became partners in selling Seattle overseas. The Port of Seattle was especially visionary in promoting the city as a trade and tourist destination—creating jobs and boosting Seattle from a provincial backwater to a world player. Trade was good; one in six jobs in Washington depended on it. That was our mantra.

After the Washington State Convention and Trade Center opened, we stepped up the effort to attract trade-related meetings. Seattle found itself well connected in DC; Bill Clinton’s trade representative, Mickey Kantor, was married to Heidi Schulman (West Seattle High ’64, one year ahead of me)—the daughter of Gerry Hoeck, a longtime Port of Seattle publicist and Democratic Party operative.

“It became clear the police had no idea how many people would show up.”—John Sellers

In 1993 the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) arranged to bring the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference—15 trade ministers and their entourages—to Seattle. Clinton, keen to make his mark in trade, invited the leaders of the 15 countries to come, too, for an “informal” summit.

Overnight the conference morphed from 500 to thousands of people. It was the wow of the decade. We scrambled for venues and hotel rooms, and moved business that was already booked. Boeing loaned executives to pull it together, we raised money overnight, the Secret Service invaded the city, and in short order a huge and very successful international conference unfolded.

The publicity was fabulous. Hotels, restaurants, and tour operators cleaned up. Seattle attracted more overseas flights. The Port, spurred by then-commissioner Paul Schell, developed the Bell Harbor International Conference Center, with state-of-the-art simultaneous translation facilities; no longer would we have to bring in interpretation equipment from our arch competitor Vancouver. We aspired to become the Geneva of the West—a small but world-class city hosting high-level meetings with significant outcomes.

We booked several smaller international meetings and decided to go after the Asian Development Bank’s 2001 meeting. A small task force headed off to ADB meetings in Japan and, in May 1998, Geneva, to lay the groundwork. On a luncheon boat cruise on Lake Geneva, I swapped notes with the Austrian finance minister. We might have been cruising on Lake Washington, except that the food was deliciously French.

A week or two later, President Clinton arrived in Geneva to address the World Trade Organization’s ministerial meeting. At the urging of Charlene Barshefsky, the new U.S. trade representative, he invited the WTO to meet the next year in the United States. The WTO accepted.

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Published: November 2009