Emmett Shear

“ Even with an entrepreneur, time, a market, locations clearly suited for action, financing from the municipal governments, and fairly good designs for the public work, if no one wants to practice city planning then it will by definition be unsuccessful. There is never a positive widespread sustained reaction to nothing.
During this period, Seattle’s downtown was in decline along with many other downtowns across the nation, and for much the same reason: people shopped in the suburbs, not in the city. The market for goods in the city center was drying up. ”

“ There was and still is no main park or particular area of Seattle that stands out above the rest. The whole of the city is filled with small parks, hills, and lakes, and this makes Seattle a very pleasant place to live in and visit. ”

“ Traveling through Seattle, it’s hard to find an area that has nothing to recommend it. At the top of every hill there is a view of a lake or the ocean, and at the bottom of every hill is a shore. There is no definable nice part of town; though there are certainly relatively wealthy neighborhoods, they are small and interspersed with less well off ones. Though there are poor neighborhoods, there are few slums. ”

“ Seattle also received the Opera House, the Coliseum, a refurbished Arena, and a great location for future carnivals and fairs. Today the Seattle Center is host to Bumbershoot, a music festival jam-packed with people every weekend before Labor Day, and Folklife, a folk music festival that somehow manages to stay in the black. The Science Center to this day draws crowds, along with an amusement park that operates all summer. The world’s fair reenergized the downtown of Seattle, and was generally a smashing success, even finishing with a profit. ”

“ The Seattle between the wars was probably a pretty nice place to live, especially to grow up in. The city was still full of single-family wood houses and parks from the Olmstead development, but because of the crash they were affordable – at least to those who still had jobs. “ [Seattle between the wars] is what suburbs try to be, but never achieve because they cannot stand things so jammed together, all for a family whose income could be well under two thousand dollars a year.” ”

“ Seattle has been successful when the period as a company town has been weakest and when the quiet period has seen thoughtful investment for the future. Seattle has almost been sent into permanent decline by its worst periods as a company town. There have been four such cycles: Lumber industry followed by an Olmstead built park system, Ship building followed by the unused Bogues Plan, Boeing followed by infrastructure building, and most recently a boom with Microsoft and other software companies, which Seattle is just leaving now. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As Boeing boomed, so did Seattle. During the war, 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 boom in housing development. 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. ”

“ In a capitalist state, where there is a surplus of relatively educated unemployed workers along with easy access to a port, jobs will come. Seattle industry did slightly better than the national average during the rest of the 1970s, but nonetheless the boom decades of the 1950s and 1960s were brought to a decisive end.
The Pike Place Market, arguably Seattle’s most important tourist attraction and a very nice market in its own right, was created in its modern form during the aftermath of the Boeing crash. ”

“ Seattle built it’s own railroad to Walla Walla which would come to reinforce Seattle’s place as a hub for the region. While both Seattle and Tacoma experienced huge booms from 1880 to 1890 based on the strength of their timber industries, only Seattle could continue growing as an exporter of services and manufacturing into the 1900s. ”

“ Both Seattle and Tacoma were essentially lumber towns, built on the resulting export income. All over the Puget Sound there are communities with the same assets Seattle started with, lumber and a port. However, Seattle’s early lead with Yesler’s mill meant that its economy was based on manufacturing as well as lumber, and was thus far more diversified than Tacoma’s. Though Tacoma got the Northern Pacific Railroad terminus, the terminus only increased the lumber trade instead of diversifying the economy. ”

“ Terry sold out Alki, Yesler put his mill in Seattle, and that was the end of Alki and the beginning of Seattle’s dominance of the Pacific Northwest.
After Terry sold out in Alki, he immediately moved in on Seattle and began acquiring land. He either owned or partially owned the first ships that moved the lumber and allowed Seattle’s main industry to exist. He gave a land grant for the University of Washington that today supplies more than $1 million a year. ”

“ He attempted to pass an initiative to build The Commons, a huge park winding through the city and over the freeway, and even put up some of his own money, but it failed to pass. He did get a football stadium built by the same technique. ”

“ The rivers, forests, lakes, and fields were once rich enough to support one of the worlds few sedentary hunter-gatherer societies. Opportunities for sailing, skiing, bicycling, camping, and hiking are close by and accessible almost all of the year. ”

“ Learn about the Market – History http://www.pikeplacemarket.org/learn/history/↑ ibid.↑ Sale, Roger. Seattle: Past to Present (University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 1976) 239↑ The Microsoft Corporation, Key Events in Microsoft History http://www.microsoft.com/msft/download/keyevents.doc↑ Allmon, Michael. Seattle real estate is climbing the charts (Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce 1998) http://www.djc.com/special/cmarket98/10036712.htm ”