Seattle's 1962 World's Fair had an insane impact on this city - but not in the ways you think
Seattle, WA is known for claiming the top of national ranking lists for its rent prices, number of cranes in its downtown core, and minimum wage. Feelings of change, newness, and challenge have been compounding for decades and for the arts and cultural sector, this can be traced back to the World’s Fair in 1962.
The arts and cultural sector in Seattle has been long connected to the 1962 World’s Fair, which served as a catalyst for some of the largest arts producers in our city. While the big exposition pooled transformative dollars into what is now McCaw Hall, Seattle Center’s infrastructure as part of the city, and its own transit system in the Monorail, it has since cast a shadow on the city’s small and midsized arts projects.
Titled “Century 21”, the 1962 World’s Fair was an expensive feat that required an immense amount of generosity, commitment from the City of Seattle, and patience. Although the amount of change to come post-1962 will rock our world, this article will focus on the impact the World’s Fair has had on the Arts and Cultural sector’s small to mid sized arts organizations.
Let me explain.
A local councilman Al Rochester had initially proposed the idea of Seattle hosting a World’s Fair in 1955 and the city threw $5k at him to build a committee, conduct a feasibility study, and advertise for a future “Civic Center” bond that Seattle voters would later support in 1957. Read more about the city’s development of Seattle Center HERE. The city’s archives remembers two other sites considered for the fairground, a fun thought-experiment to think through; if Seattle Center was actually on the Sand Point Naval Air Station. The Monorail would be a lot longer if that were the case…
The committee landed on a theme of “futurism”, spurring massive financial support from leading economic producers Ford Motor Company, the Boeing Company, and Bell Telephone. The committee was tasked with creating an attraction on-site, which soon became the Space Needle with a Monorail connecting the downtown transit hub (Westlake Center) to Seattle Center. As the city’s archives recall, the committee wanted to “gradually create an aesthetically adventurous cityscape intended to excite the visitor with futuristic visions of scientific progress.”
This huge citywide event attracted nearly 10 million people to the city at large and through the gates at Seattle Center. And it kept people coming back. Before the 1962 World’s Fair, Seattle would on average grow by about 30,000 residents each year. Post 1962, Seattle began to see a steady incline each year of 50,000 residents, launching its population to over 2 million by 1986. The growth rate of our city has since plateaued, but hovers around 3.5 million in 2024.
More people means more need for housing, more need for urban resources, jobs, and public planning. When looking at nonprofits in this city, which typically arise out of community need, a growing population correlates directly to a growing nonprofit sector. In 2024, Seattle is home to 8,476 nonprofit organizations ranging in purpose from religious organizations to philanthropic foundations to health institutions. About 2,000 of them are arts and cultural organizations. (Data from CauseIQ).
According to Adam McCann’s Most Charitable States article published on WalletHub in November of 2023, Washington ranked #25 in charitable giving and holds the #15 spot for total number of nonprofits. (Source). In January of 2024, the National Endowment for the Arts announced its list of awarded organizations nationwide. Out of the total 1,288 grants totaling $32,223,055, Washington based arts and cultural institutions secured 36 grants totaling $918,200. The average grant size was $15,000. (NEA, 2024).
So, what does all of this data have to do with Seattle’s small to mid-sized arts organizations? If the World’s Fair in 1962 brought about changes to our city’s infrastructure, adding transit options, and inspiring more community engagement, what is really getting overshadowed?
I’m so glad you asked.
The city of Seattle ranks #10 in the nation’s GDP per capita.
I’ll rephrase: Seattle is one of the top ranking cities, among New York City, Los Angeles, and San Jose, for its gross domestic product per capita. According to this GeekWire article, Seattle has breezed its way to a #4 spot for Cities by Economics Score. Kurt Schlosser, who wrote the article, says that, “a range of large employers, including tech companies as well as aerospace (Boeing) and retail (Starbucks, Costco, Nordstrom) gives Seattle ‘one of the highest GDP per person levels in the index, and a healthy economic stability measure,’” (Schlosser, 2024). So while Washington state ranks in only the top half of the nation’s most philanthropic states, it sits at the top for its economic influence.
This set of findings illuminates why large arts and cultural organizations in Seattle, particularly those on the Seattle Center campus, have disproportionately large budgets compared to the smaller organizations operating elsewhere in the city. While Seattle Repertory Theater operates and performs on the Seattle Center campus with an average ~$19million budget each year, the 48 year old Taproot Theater in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood has just ~$3million to utilize each year for their programming and staff. The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP, formerly known as the Experimental Music Project or EMP) similarly lives on the Seattle Center campus with a budget of roughly $19million each year while museums across the city start to pop up as for-profit businesses, or for Museum of Museums next to the Swedish Hospital’s First Hill campus, close altogether.
Of course, the arts organizations located on the Seattle Center campus are not the only large entities that Seattle residents love. Additional large arts producers include;
the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) with a blustering $100million budget located by Seattle’s Waterfront on 1st and Union,
Seattle Symphony Orchestra that operates out of Benaroya Hall next to SAM with a $36million annual budget, and
the 5th Ave Theatre with a $30million budget in the heart of downtown.
As you start to leave the downtown Seattle core, arts nonprofit budgets start to dramatically decline. ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) is just barely in the First Hill fold with a $5million budget, Town Hall Seattle not too far away has a $4million annual budget, Hugo House up in Capitol Hill has a $1.8million budget, and Whim W’Him Contemporary Dance Company up in Queen Anne has just nearly a $1million annual operating budget. This list does not even start to touch the neighborhoods that have been historically redlined, a dark history of Seattle that pushed out Black and Brown populations from neighborhoods through unfairly high interest rates on home mortgages. (That history is wild, if you’d like to go down a rabbit hole, here’s a jumping off point - History of Redlining in Seattle.)
While we can’t make the case that all arts nonprofit organizations in Seattle with high budgets live on the Seattle Center campus, we can conclude that organizations residing on a campus that holds a cherished place in our city’s history will have a longevity and status quo the city deems worthy of sustaining. As a result, Seattle’s arts and cultural sector feels disparate; the largest and most prolific organizations operate in and around Seattle Center while mid-sized and small organizations continually struggle outside of the Seattle core.
It begs me to ponder what it means to live and work in a state that holds such a unique place in our nation’s landscape, who’s determining the artistic personality of Seattle? Is it the largest arts producers? The ones able to galvanize large groups of individuals in support of arts experiences featuring local artists? Or does the personality come from the small to mid-sized arts organizations who offer artists safe opportunities to play?
For many adults, (you’ll understand why I say adults, I promise) Seattle’s creative personality is often characterized by its grunge phase. Formed because of the Seattle-based record label SubPop, grunge became the sound that defined the city. In the 1990s, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green River came on the scene with a gritty sound, emotional song lyrics, and low budget productions. The record label’s influence on the style of the city remains to this day; what was considered “unprofessional” became the new standard. We joke that the Pacific Northwest style is more casual than any other cities and this is part of that origin. But that’s what made it so great; grunge is approachable, authentic, and unpolished.
The grunge personality is still what attracts artists to the city.
Artists could pop up in warehouses and make work without the same effort it would take in New York City or Los Angeles. Theater artists could produce performances and make mistakes; try, try, and try again. Seattle’s affinity for grunge trickled into the arts and artists could hone their practice here, build relationships, and form partnerships. The creativity of this city, grunge and unpolished, was a perfect opposing expression to the futurism, technology, and forward momentum the World’s Fair pressed upon it. Now, some 30 years later, the two opposing values are still facing off.
There’s a tether between the big arts projects and organizations operating in this city with the artists who continually practice, try, try, and try again. This tether is delicate because as organizations begin to feel stretched too thin with all the rising costs that come with a COVID-cautious world and political unrest not to mention global human crisis’ (multiple), artists are at risk for losing their hold on that tether; the thing that keeps them here, making, working, and trying. With the largest organizations struggling to make ends meet, so too are the mid-sized orgs on the outskirts. The small organizations, too, feel the impact. While the large organizations’ missions are to make world-renowned productions, the small to mid-sized arts organizations’ missions are focused on supporting artists. The cycle feeds itself out of necessity.
When there’s no more tether keeping local artists to the large arts producers, what voice will this city truly have? What personality does Seattle have when artists can no longer rely on small to mid-sized arts organizations for resources to play?
While the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 generated an immense amount of growth, wealth, and opportunity for the city, it also serves as a cautionary tale. Both ends of the spectrum and all that lays between deserve the same attention - the future visions for scientific progress alongside its culture-bearers.
The immense amount of joy it brings me each day to see the Space Needle and revel in the Seattle Center’s immaculate outdoor spaces feels sometimes bittersweet. Because of this little piece of our city’s history, so much has happened as a result. Now 62 years later, the arts and cultural sector struggles to maintain its creativity and accessibility at the sizes the World’s Fair promised. Seattle is now tasked with honoring and uplifting the work the small to mid-sized arts organizations produce to keep artists here.
