History of Seattle Since 1940 - WWII and The Boeing Era: 1945 - 1970

1970

From World War II until 1970, Seattle underwent what amounted to a long, sustained economic boom, although not without occasional reverses. Boeing was hiring, the economy was booming, and while there had been no successful regional planning, the city had not yet grown quite large enough.

The Boeing airplane company grew out of the fortune of William "Bill" Boeing's boat company and his fascination with airplanes and flying. In 1917, before American entry into World War I, Boeing employed only 28 people, but when the war orders started coming in, Boeing grew to "an enterprising firm with the one customer airplane builders had in those days, the federal government. Employing about four thousand people, with sales just under ten million dollars a year, it was a good if unspectacular business for Seattle." The company struggled through the period between the wars, and "began to build dressers, counters and furniture for a corset company and a confectioner's shop, as well as flat-bottomed boats called sea sleds." However, when World War II started, the government suddenly desired tens of thousands of planes a year, and Boeing was positioned to provide them. Working under fixed-fee contracts, Boeing churned out airplanes and became by far the largest employer in Seattle.

However, Boeing spawned few local spin-off industries; only 5% of the subcontracted work was in the Puget Sound. Boeing was, by intention, a place where engineers designed the planes and line workers assembled parts that were imported from all over the world. Ostensibly, this would reduce the dependency of Seattle's economy on the fortunes of the airline business. The problem was that Seattle was still dependent on the airline business, without enjoying any of the spin-off industries that might have diversified the economy. When the war ended, "the military canceled its bomber orders; Boeing factories shut down and 70,000 people lost their jobs," and initially it appeared that Seattle had little to show for the wartime Boeing boom. While the war was on, almost all production went either towards Boeing factories or Boeing planes. After the war, the crash ensured that no one would have much money for new local development.

This period of stagnation soon ended with the rise of the jet airplane and Boeing's reincarnation as the world's leading producer of commercial passenger planes. With the Boeing 707-120, Seattle became Boeing's company town; "in 1947 Boeing employed about one out of every five of King County's manufacturing workers, in 1957 about every other one." As Boeing boomed, so did Seattle. From 1940 to 1950, the population increased 99,289 or 27% from 368,302 to 467,591. From 1950 to 1960, the population increased 89,496 or 20% to 557,087. All of those people had to live somewhere, and the Fifties saw a huge housing boom. Population density all over Seattle exploded as people filled the boundaries of settlement in the city and began to move north. Most of the development was in single-family houses, since land was plentiful.

At the same time, the freeways were being built to compensate for all this new growth. The community of Mercer Island, the "Eastside" (east of Lake Washington) communities of Bryn Mawr, Newport, Bellevue, Clyde Hill, Hunts Point, Medina, Juanita, and the northern suburbs of Kenmore, Lake Forest Park, and Lake Hills all came into being during the Boeing boom. Interstate 5 (I-5) cut the city in half on a north-south axis, while I-90 crossed east-west, connecting with Mercer Island via the floating Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge. SR 520 skirted the north end of Montlake just south of the Montlake Cut, and paralleled I-90 with its own floating bridge. I-5 neatly cut off Downtown Seattle from Capitol Hill, First Hill, and even from part of the historic downtown, including the tony Sorrento Hotel, which was left stranded on the "wrong" side of the freeway. I-90 was perhaps less disruptive (unless, of course, you were living in its path), since it is partly routed through a tunnel and skirts a more-or-less unbuildable edge of Beacon Hill, avoiding slicing the city into north and south halves. Freeway Park was eventually built over I-5 in 1976, restoring something of a link between Downtown and First Hill, but was not heavily enough used to provide much mitigation. The R.H. Thompson Expressway, planned to connect SR 520 with I-90 and SR 167, was never built, after the initial urban freeway construction sparked a Seattle echo of San Francisco's earlier Freeway Revolt.

With all this postwar growth came growing pollution of the lakes and rivers that provided much of the beauty that had been Seattle's appeal to its recent immigrants. Also, the sprawl constantly demanded more roads, since the ones already built had terrible traffic. (Naturally, new roads simply led to new development and were soon as snarled as those they were intended to relieve.) A group of Seattle natives, anxious to preserve the city in which they grew up, came together to institute the Metropolitan Problems Committee, or METRO, intended to manage and plan the metropolitan area. The driving force behind this movement was Jim Ellis, who headed the committee and repeatedly brought the planning issue before the voters and city governments. The logic was that a regional transit system would require a regional political body; the same held for regional sewage and pollution control or regional growth planning. The original, comprehensive METRO regional plan was defeated in a vote by suburbanites who seemed to view the problem not as one of pollution, transit, sprawl, or lack of planning: in what some Seattleites referred to as the "Pave the Lake" strategy, they just wanted more bridges across Lake Washington.

METRO came back, scaled down to a sewage treatment and transport organization, and prevailed with an overwhelming majority in Seattle and a decent showing in the suburbs. METRO, despite repeated attempts by Jim Ellis, never did manage to get authority for planning, and to this day there is no single body responsible for planning the Seattle metropolitan area and its transportation systems. (METRO was eventually merged into the King County government.) Seattle and King County have, at times, seemed better at coming up with money for stadiums and other large public works than for broader projects.

During this period, Seattle's downtown was in decline (as were many other downtowns across the nation, for much the same reason): people shopped in the suburbs, not in the city. The market for goods in the city's center was drying up. Seattle's solution was to host the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World's Fair. The area directly north of downtown was slumping very badly—some of it to the point of being known as the "Warren Avenue slum"—and the city owned a lot of property almost adjacent to that "slum". The fair, given a futuristic science theme, was designed to leave behind a civic center, now known as Seattle Center, containing arts buildings, a food court, museums, and the like and serving also as a fairground. The United States Science Pavilion (now the Pacific Science Center) was one of the central attractions. Boeing performed one of its few altruistic public actions: they "created and installed in the United States Science Pavilion a space age Spacearium, a permanent addition to the center and one of the most attractive features of the fair."

In conjunction with the fair, a demonstration monorail line was constructed, running from the center of downtown to the fair, a distance of 0.9 miles; it was constructed at no cost to the city and was paid for out of ticket sales, and then turned over to the city for $600,000. (See Seattle Center Monorail). It is currently the only monorail in the United States to turn a profit. It is now almost exclusively a tourist attraction, as the distance covered is too small to be of much practical use unless you are living in a hotel downtown and visiting the Seattle Center. The World's Fair also granted Seattle the landmark Space Needle, also a continuing tourist attraction. Seattle also acquired an Opera House, a Coliseum, and a refurbished Arena (all of which have since been replaced or significantly remodeled), and a great location for future carnivals and fairs. Today, Seattle Center is host to the Bite of Seattle, Bumbershoot, a music and art festival that draws crowds in the hundreds of thousands every Labor Day Weekend, Northwest Folklife Festival on Memorial Day Weekend, a comparably large folk music and folk culture festival, which somehow manages to stay in the black despite being free to all comers, and PrideFest, a finali of the much larger event Seattle Gay Pride Parade like many other cities every year in late June in honor of the 1969 Stonewall Riots proudly flying the pride flag atop the Space Needle for the first time in 2010. The Pacific Science Center continues to draw crowds, along with a small amusement park that operates all summer. The World's Fair arguably reenergized the downtown of Seattle, and was generally a smashing success, even finishing with a profit.

After the war, the University of Washington also took a step forward, finally fulfilling the promise of its name. Charles Odegaard, as president of the University, used his office to press for the creation of community colleges and other four-year colleges in Washington, so that the University of Washington could concentrate on research. By the time Odegaard retired, the UW was second only to MIT in the size of its federal grants, and the number of students attending had swelled. Because the University of Washington campus is open, its impact on the University District as well as the rest of the city was quite significant; "In remaining a largely commuter school, the university has diminished its ability to withdraw as a community in itself and has maintained thereby its ability to the larger and more amorphous community."