Picturing the Mid-Century Rise of Jet City

Open any coffee table book of historic photographs, particularly one with old photos of your hometown, and the experience as you flip through the pages is always the same.

First, it’s whimsically nostalgic as you wonder how people could have every lived in such an age. Then, it’s curiously nostalgic, as you look closer at the workings of life in earlier times. Finally, it’s painfully nostalgic as you come to realize what has been lost forever, a building, a mindset, a way of life.

Turner Publishing Company has just released a new coffee table book that, for any long term Seattleite, has equal doses of all three types of nostalgia. Historic Photos of Seattle in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, with text and captions by David Wilma, is an excellent black-and-white trip down memory lane. And like all such trips, there are some good and some bad memories.

First of all, kudos to Wilma and Turner for selecting pictures from the recent instead of distant past. Pictures from the Victorian era are, for me, too hard to place in context. The city they represent is long gone, paved over and lost. 

The photos in this book feature earlier lives of buildings, streets and festivals that are still close at hand. And by choosing this era to document, Wilma creates a much more evocative series of images. 

Pike Place Market Street Fair, 1975, courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives

The book documents Seattle’s rise from a coastal hub of timber and fishing to a powerhouse city that flourished after the Second World War. Companies like Nordstrom and Boeing really came of age in these thirty years and this book does a nice job of reflecting the city’s rapid economic rise.

Wilma has selected a large number of photos from various archives reflecting the construction of the interstate highway system through Seattle, including our two floating bridges. It’s interesting to see how these roads dissected our city and reshaped it and it’s poignant to reflect that, just 30 to 60 years later these are the structures that we are currently arguing about replacing and repairing. 

The book is heavy on images of the 1962 World’s Fair, and that is completely justified. The Century 21 Exposition made Seattle. It thrust the city into the national spotlight (including the cover of Life Magazine) and attracted such luminaries as John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley. 

It’s this section of the book that is painfully nostalgic. The ’62 Fair set out to showcase a glorious future where Monorails would whisk commuters around cities and winged cars would defeat all traffic. We’d be living and working on the moon in the 21st Century, cities would be streamlined, slender and bold, and space travel would be plush and common.

The Ford Company’s “Adventure in Outer Space” is from the UW Libraries Special Collection.

One of the hands-down best photos is a shot of the Ford Motor Company’s “An Adventure in Outer Space” where visitors, in crisp vinyl airline seats, took a 15-minute space journey to Saturn, Mars and distant galaxies. I’d give anything to take that ride. 

Unfortunately, the world hasn’t really happened that way and looking at the pictures of the fair reminds you that nothing ages faster than our view of the future.

There are also errors of inclusion and omission in the book. Seattle was a hotbed of dissent and protest in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In 1970, over a week in May, protests on the UW campus spilled over into the U-District and downtown and marchers, (including a 10-year-old RvO) closed down I-5 in response to America’s secret bombing of Cambodia and the death of four students at Kent State. Only one picture in Wilma’s book focuses on this fascinating time of social upheaval: a shot of a Gerberding Hall after a bomb explosion (no one was harmed). 

There are also no shots of the wildly creative dress code of the sixties and seventies. Couldn’t we have a few shots of hippies on Capitol Hill? Blurry pictures of rides at the Fun Forest are no substitute. 

Last days of the Seattle Hotel, from the Seattle Municipal Archives

Wilma also has selected an oddly large number of static shots of old buildings around the city, many of them still standing. There are six or seven shots of University Street (the Ave), but it doesn’t look all that different. Most of the buildings are still there, there are just more teriyaki and pizza joints. What’s missing is a sense of the culture of the times or an acknowledgment that the city’s population grew amazingly fast from 1950 to 1980, making the city more diverse, but also more divided.

Probably the best thing about Historic Photos of Seattle in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that Wilma hasn’t selected many too-familiar or over-used photos. It’s possible this is the first time many of these photos has ever been published. Flipping the pages is satisfying and informative. Perhaps a Volume Two could tell us less about how it looked to live in Seattle over three mid-century decades and more about how it felt to live here.