History of Seattle
This is the main article of a series that covers the history of Seattle, Washington, a city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States of America.
Other notable village sites include the birthplace of Chief Seattle, which was located near the current footprint of the King Street Station.
However, Luther Collins, Henry Van Asselt, and the Maple family founded a farming settlement on what is currently the Seattle neighborhood of Georgetown on September 27, 1851.
Charlie Terry sold out Alki (which, after his departure barely held on as a settlement), moved to Seattle and began acquiring land.
Despite being officially founded by the Methodists of the Denny Party, Seattle quickly developed a reputation as a wide-open town, a haven for prostitution, liquor, and gambling.
In the 1880s, Seattle got its first streetcar and cable car, ferry service, a YMCA gymnasium, and the exclusive Rainier Club, and passed an ordinance requiring attached sewer lines for all new residences.
Downtown Seattle was bustling with activity; as quickly as previous inhabitants moved out to newly created neighborhoods, new immigrants came in to take their place in the city core.
The schools expanded their curriculum from the basic core to include music and art, physical education, vocational training, and programs for immigrants and special needs students.
He was a tireless reformer who investigated red light districts and crime scenes, denouncing corrupt politicians, businessmen and saloon keepers.
He built a model church, with night schools, unemployment bureaus, a kindergarten, Anti-tuberculosis clinics, and America's first church-owned radio station.
With the Atlantic a scene of belligerency, World War I increased Pacific maritime trade and caused a boom in shipbuilding, there was very little growth in new industries.
Australian painter Ambrose Patterson arrived in 1919; over the next few decades Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Irving Anderson, and Paul Horiuchi would establish themselves as nationally and internationally known artists.
Bandleader Vic Meyers and others kept the speakeasies jumping through the Prohibition era, and by mid-century the thriving jazz scene in the city's Skid Road district would launch the careers of musicians including Ray Charles and Quincy Jones.
[20] During the Maritime Strike of 1934, Smith Cove was nearly a battle zone; shippers were scared, to the point where Seattle lost most of its Asian trade to Los Angeles.
At the combined Todd Shipyards/Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding operation, 33,000 men and women worked in Tacoma to build five freighters, two transports, 37 escort carriers, five gasoline tankers, and three destroyer tenders.
The Lake Washington Shipyard at Houghton, now annexed to Kirkland, employed 6,000 workers to repair dozens of merchant vessels and ferries during the war and to turn out ships for the Navy.
[22] The war also attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the country, as the greatly expanded wartime production quickly exhausted local labor pools.
Most African American workers came to Seattle as shipyard employees, and by summer 1942, the National Youth Administration brought to the city the first group of blacks to work for Boeing.
Moreover, the 4,000 black soldiers and sailors stationed at Fort Lawton in Seattle and other military installations nearby contributed to the new employment diversity of the African American population.
[24] The newcomers became permanent residents, building up black political influence, strengthening civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, and calling for antidiscrimination legislation.
Local grocers and the Pike Place Market lost the bounty of hundreds of Japanese American truck farms, including the 55 families who had produced famed strawberries in Bellevue.
However, this period of stagnation soon ended with the rise of the jet aircraft and Boeing's reincarnation as the world's leading producer of commercial passenger planes.
During this period, Seattle attempted to counter the decline of its downtown and the area immediately to the north by hosting the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World's Fair.
Due to the simultaneous decline in Vietnam War military spending, the slowing of the space program as Project Apollo neared completion, the recession of 1969-1970,[28]: 291 the cancellation of the supersonic transport (SST),[29][30][31] and Boeing's $2 billion in debt as it built the 747 airliner,[28]: 303 the company and the Seattle area greatly suffered.
Pike Place Market, arguably Seattle's most important tourist attraction, gained its modern form in the aftermath of the Boeing crash.
The internment of Seattle's Japanese-Americans during World War II had hit the market particularly hard, since 80% of its "wet stall" vendors had been ethnically Japanese.
The project was wildly successful in spite of intense opposition by the Seattle Establishment, and today the Pike Place Market pulls in nine million visitors each year.
[33] By 1985, sales were over $140 million, by 1990, $1.18 billion, and by 1995, Microsoft was the world's most profitable corporation, Allen and Gates were billionaires, and thousands of their past and present employees were millionaires.
Paul Allen, whose fortune was made through Microsoft though he had long since ceased to be an active participant in the company, was a major force in Seattle politics.
[38] Much of the content of this page is from "Seattle: Booms and Busts", by Emmett Shear, who has granted blanket permission for material from that paper to be reused in Wikipedia.
