Century 21 Exposition

The Century 21 Exposition (also known as the Seattle World's Fair) was a world's fair held April 21, 1962, to October 21, 1962, in Seattle, Washington, United States. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair during its six-month run.

As planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works; some credit it with revitalizing Seattle's economic and cultural life (see History of Seattle (1940–present)). The fair saw the construction of the Space Needle and Alweg monorail, as well as several sports venues (Washington State Coliseum, now Climate Pledge Arena) and performing arts buildings (the Playhouse, now the Cornish Playhouse), most of which have since been replaced or heavily remodeled. Unlike some other world's fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit. Planning officials agreed to proposals by prominent scientists to showcase the scientific achievements of the United States of America. About 75 percent of the fair buildings were constructed to be permanent.

Cold War and Space Race context

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. With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really 'behind' the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space". As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".

As it happened, the Cold War had an additional effect on the fair. President John F. Kennedy was supposed to attend the closing ceremony of the fair on October 21, 1962. He bowed out, pleading a "heavy cold"; it later became public that he was dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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.

Buildings and grounds

thumb|right|Aerial view of the fairgrounds in 1962

thumb|Map showing major features of the grounds

Once the fair idea was conceived, several sites were considered. Among the sites considered within Seattle were Duwamish Head in West Seattle; Fort Lawton (now Discovery Park) in the Magnolia neighborhood; and First Hill—even closer to Downtown than the site finally selected, but far more densely developed. Two sites south of the city proper were considered—Midway, near Des Moines, and the Army Depot in Auburn—as was a site east of the city on the south shore of Lake Sammamish. Some of the land had been donated to the city by James Osborne in 1881 and by David and Louisa Denny in 1889. Two lots at Third Avenue N. and John Street were purchased from St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, who had been planning to build a new church building there; the church used the proceeds to purchase land in the Montlake neighborhood. The Warren Avenue School, a public elementary school with several programs for physically Disabled students, was torn down, its programs dispersed, and provided most of the site of the Coliseum (now Climate Pledge Arena). 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 old Fire Station No. 4 was also sacrificed.

As early as the 1909 Bogue plan, this part of Lower Queen Anne had been considered for a civic center. 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), 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). It served as the site of the Century 21 Club. This membership organization, formed especially for the fair, charged $250 for membership and offered lounge, dining room, and other club facilities, as well as a gate pass for the duration of the fair. The city ended up leasing the property after the fair and in 1977 bought it from the Masons. The building was eventually incorporated into a theater complex including the Seattle Children's Theatre.

Paul Thiry was the fair's chief architect; he also designed the Coliseum building. 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. Yamasaki would later design New York's World Trade Center. Victor Steinbrueck and John Graham, Jr. designed the Space Needle. Hideki Shimizu and Kazuyuki Matsushita designed the original International Fountain.

The grounds of the fair were divided into:

World of Science
World of Century 21 (also known as World of Tomorrow

Besides the monorail, which survives , the fair also featured a Skyride that ran across the grounds from the Gayway to the International Mall. The bucket-like three-person cars were suspended from cables that rose as high as off the ground. The Skyride was moved to the Puyallup Fairgrounds in 1980.

World of Science

thumb|The [[United States Science Pavilion, "a virtual cathedral of science". These exhibits were the federal government's major contribution to the fair.

In "The Threshold and the Threat", visitors rode a "Bubbleator" into the "world of tomorrow". Music "from another world" and a shifting pattern of lights accompanied them on a 40-second upward journey to a starry space bathed in golden light. Then they were faced briefly with an image of a desperate family in a fallout shelter, which vanished and was replaced by a series of images reflecting the sweep of history, starting with the Acropolis and ending with an image of Marilyn Monroe.

World of Commerce and Industry

The World of Commerce and Industry was divided into domestic and foreign areas. 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. It included the Space Needle and what is now the Broad Street Green and Mural Amphitheater. The latter included 15 governmental exhibitors and surrounded the World of Tomorrow and extended to the north edge of the fair.

Among the features of Domestic Commerce and Industry, the massive Interiors, Fashion, and Commerce Building spread for —nearly the entire Broad Street side of the grounds—with exhibits ranging from 32 separate furniture companies to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Vogue produced four fashion shows daily alongside a perfumed pool. Standard Oil of California celebrated, among other things, the fact that the world's first service station opened in Seattle in 1907. which was later shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. There were also several religious pavilions.

World of Art

thumb|upright|[[Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres|Ingres' Oedipus and the Sphinx was among the works displayed in the Fine Arts Pavilion.]]

The Fine Arts Pavilion (later the Exhibition Hall) brought together an art exhibition unprecedented for the West Coast of the United States. 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.

thumb|upright|[[Igor Stravinsky]]

A separate gallery presented Northwest Coast Indian art, and featured a series of large paintings by Bill Holm introducing Northwest Native motifs.

World of Entertainment

A US$15 million performing-arts program at the fair ranged from a boxing championship to an international twirling competition but with no shortage of nationally and internationally famous performers, especially at the new Opera House and Playhouse. After the fair, the Playhouse became the Seattle Repertory Theatre; in the mid-1980s it became the Intiman Playhouse. When the Intiman Theatre became financially unstable, Cornish College of the Arts took over the lease from the city of Seattle, and now operates it as the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.

Opera House performances

Scheduled groups performing at the Opera House included:

Source:

{|class="wikitable"

! Date (all dates are 1962)

! Act

|April 21||Opening Night: Seattle Symphony Orchestra conducted by guest conductor Igor Stravinsky with Van Cliburn as a guest soloist

|April 22–25||The Ed Sullivan Show, live telecasts

|April 20 – May 5||Dunninger the Mentalist

|May 6||The Littlest Circus

|May 8–12||The San Francisco Ballet

|May 13||Science Fiction Panel including Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling

|May 15–16||Seattle Symphony Orchestra conducted by Milton Katims, with guest soloists Isaac Stern, Adele Addison, and Albert DaCosta

|May 17–19||Victor Borge

|May 22||Theodore Bikel

|May 24–25||The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy

|May 29 – June 3||The Old Vic Company (Shakespeare performances)

|June 7, June 9, June 11||Seattle Symphony production of Verdi's Aida, featuring Gloria Davy, Sandor Konya, Irene Dalis, Robert Merrill, and Jan Rubeš

|June 10||Josh White

|June 17||Norwegian Chorus and Dancers

|June 18–19||Ukrainian State Dance Company (U.S. premiere)

|June 22–23||International Gospel Quartets

|July 8||SPEBSQSA Barbershop Quartet Song Fest

|July 9–14||Bayanihan Dancers of the Philippines

|July 24 – August 4||New York City Ballet Company

|August 27 – September 2||Ballet Folklorico de Mexico

|September 10||CBC Vancouver Chamber Orchestra

|September 18–23||D'Oyly Carte Opera Company (Gilbert and Sullivan operettas)

|September 25–30||Rapsodia Romîna: Romanian National Folk Ensemble and Barbu Lăutaru Orchestra of Bucharest (U.S. premiere)

|October 2–7||Uday Shankar Dancers

|October 8–13||Foo-Hsing Theater (Republic of China), youth Chinese opera

|October 14||U.S. Marine Corps Band

|October 16–17||Seattle Symphony Orchestra conducted by Milton Katims, world premiere of new work by Gerald Kechley

Other performances

thumb|190px|[[Marty Krofft displays the puppets of Les Poupées de Paris backstage]]

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. Also during the fair, Memorial Stadium hosted the Ringling Brothers Circus, Tommy Bartlett's Water Ski Sky and Stage Show, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans' Western Show, and an appearance by evangelist Billy Graham.

The fair and the city were the setting of the Elvis Presley movie It Happened at the World's Fair (1963), with a young Kurt Russell making his first screen appearance. Location shooting began on September 4 and concluded nearly two weeks later. The film would be released the following spring, long after the fair had ended.

Show Street

At the northeast corner of the grounds (now the KCTS-TV studios Tamer entertainment came in forms such as the Paris Spectacular wax museum, an elaborate Japanese Village, and the Hawaiian Pavilion. In 2011, the Fun Forest was shut down and the Chihuly Garden and Glass opened in its place.

;Boulevards of the World: Boulevards of the World was "the shopping center of the fair". It also included the Plaza of the States and the original version of the International Fountain.

;Exhibit Fair: The Exhibit Fair provided another shopping district under the north stands of Memorial Stadium.

;Food and Favors: "Food and Favors", officially one of the "areas" of the fair, simply encompassed the various restaurants, food stands, etc., scattered throughout the grounds. These ranged from vending machines and food stands to the Eye of the Needle (atop the Space Needle) and the private Century 21 Club.

;Food Circus: The Food Circus was a food court in the former armory, later named the Center House, and renamed the Armory in 2012 as a remodel of the building continues. Unlike the current arrangement with a stage and a large open space for dancing, events, and temporary booths, many food booths were in the middle of the room as well as at the edges. There were 52 concessionaires in all, nine of them with exhibits in addition to their food for sale. Beginning in 1963, the Food Circus also housed a variety of museums, including Jones' Fantastic Show, the Jules Charbneau World of Miniatures, and the Pullen Klondike Museum.

Promotional video

File:1962 Seattle World's Fair commercial.ogv

Notes

References

Official Guide Book: Seattle World's Fair 1962, Acme Publications: Seattle (1962)

External links

Expo 1962 Seattle | Bureau International des Expositions
Seattle Photographs Collection, Century 21 Exposition – University of Washington Digital Collection
Pamphlet and Textual Ephemera Collection, Century 21 Exposition documents – University of Washington Digital Collection
Century 21 Digital Collection | Seattle Public Library
Century 21 – The 1962 Seattle World's Fair | HistoryLink