He recruited community and business leaders, as well as running a petition campaign, in the early 1950s to convince the city council to approve an $8.5 million bond issue to build the opera house and sports center needed to attract the fair.

[5] The fair was originally conceived at a Washington Athletic Club luncheon in 1955 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, but it soon became clear that that date was too ambitious.

As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".

[9] The fair's vision of the future displayed a technologically based optimism that did not anticipate any dramatic social change, one rooted in the 1950s rather than in the cultural tides that would emerge in the 1960s.

Affluence, automation, consumerism, and American power would grow; social equity would simply take care of itself on a rising tide of abundance; the human race would master nature through technology rather than view it in terms of ecology.

[16] Near the school, some of the city's oldest houses, apartments, and commercial buildings were torn down; they had been run down to the point of being known as the "Warren Avenue slum".

The Civic Auditorium (later the Opera House, now McCaw Hall), the ice arena (later Mercer Arena), and the Civic Field (rebuilt in 1946 as the High School Memorial Stadium),[19][20] all built in 1927 had been placed there based on that plan, as was an armory (the Food Circus during the fair, later Center House).

Among the other architects of the fair, Seattle-born Minoru Yamasaki received one of his first major commissions to build the United States Science Pavilion.

[18] Despite the plan to build a permanent civic center, more than half the structures built for the fair were torn down more or less immediately after it ended.

[2] One attempt to conserve installations from Century 21 was the creation of a replica "welcoming pole," a number of which originally stood tall over the southern entrance to the fair.

[30] Next, visitors were beckoned into a cluster of cubes containing a model of a "city of the future" (which a few landmarks clearly indicated as Seattle) and its suburban and rural surroundings, seen first by day and later by night.

[30] The exhibit continued with a vision of future transportation (centered on a monorail and high-speed "air cars" on an electrically controlled highway).

[30] Finally, the tour ended with a symbolic sculptural tree and the reappearance of the family in the fallout shelter and the sound of a ticking clock, a brief silence, an extract from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, followed by a further "symphony of music and color".

RCA (which produced "The Threshold and the Threat") exhibited television, radio, and stereo technology, as well as its involvement in space.

The former was sited mainly south of American Way (the continuation of Thomas Street through the grounds), an area it shared with the World of Science.

The Taiwan and South Korea pavilions showed their rapid industrialization to the world and the benefits of capitalism over communism during the time of cold war era.

Among the 50 contemporary American painters whose works shown were Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Ben Shahn, and Frank Stella, as well as Northwest painters Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, Paul Horiuchi, and Mark Tobey.

American sculptors included Leonard Baskin, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, and 19 others.

The 50 international contemporary artists represented included the likes of painters Fritz Hundertwasser, Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, and Francis Bacon, and sculptors Henry Moore and Jean Arp.

In addition, there were exhibitions of Mark Tobey's paintings and of Asian art, drawn from the collections of the Seattle Art Museum; and an additional exhibition of 72 "masterpieces" ranging from Titian, El Greco, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Rubens through Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, and Turner to Klee, Braque, and Picasso, with no shortage of other comparably famous artists represented.

[44] Scheduled groups performing at the Opera House included: Source:[45] Events and performances at the Playhouse included Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre; a chamber music performance by Isaac Stern, Milton Katims, Leonard Rose, Eugene Istomin, the Claiborne Brothers gospel quartet, and the Juilliard String Quartet; two appearances by newsman Edward R. Murrow; Bunraku theater; Richard Dyer-Bennet; Hal Holbrook's solo show as Mark Twain; the Count Basie and Benny Goodman jazz orchestras; Lawrence Welk; Nat King Cole; and Ella Fitzgerald.

At the northeast corner of the grounds (now the KCTS-TV studios[14]), Show Street was the "adult entertainment" portion of the fair.

[47][48] Tamer entertainment came in forms such as the Paris Spectacular wax museum, an elaborate Japanese Village, and the Hawaiian Pavilion.