Since before Seattle voters decided in 1902 to build their own lighting plant, City Light has been a source of fierce civic pride for its independence from "foreign" corporations, its impressive public works projects, and its consistently low electricity rates. It has also been a headache for competitors, managers, and politicians. In the first years of the electric age, when Seattle was still a hard-scrable frontier town, power was supplied by a revolving cast of small private utilities remembered mostly for frequent mergers with rivals and mediocre service at high cost. The failure of the privately owned water company to deliver enough of its product to quell Seattle's Great Fire of 18889 got city officials and residents thinking about an alternative utility model--municipal ownership. Voters quickly approved a municipal wter system, and within a decade had laid the groundwork for an electric utility. City Light quickly began a campaign of dam construction that for most of the twentieth century provided Seattle with the cheapest electricity of any major city in the country. This brisk history traces the utility's origins to 1889 and follows its story through the national energy crisis of 2000-2001 up to the present. It is a quintissentially Northwest story.

Power for the People: A History of Seattle City Light

Business & Money

Crowley, Walt

Wilma, David W.

Biography & History

History Link

This richly illustrated and well-researched volume chronicles the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held in Seattle in 1909. The 3.7 million visitors to the fair during its four-month run, on what was to become the University of Washington campus, beheld a cornucopia of exhibits housed in an astonishing collection of buildings and enjoyed the carnival-like - and sometimes controversial - entertainments of the Pay Streak midway. Starting with the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, authors Alan J. Stein and Paula Becker recount in detail the history of the fair that brought Seattle and Washington into the national spotlight. The A-Y-P Exposition was a major community effort for a state that was only twenty years old. It was the first world's fair to make a profit, it provided a platform for advocates of woman suffrage, and it set the general plan for the University of Washington campus that endures to this day.

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Washington's First World's Fair: A Timeline History

History

Stein, Alan J.

Becker-Brown, Paula

Americas

The Fairmont, The First Century of a San Francisco Landmark - story of the historic San Francisco Fairmont hotel

The Fairmont, The First Century of a San Francisco Landmark

Follow the history of Woodland Park Zoo from its nineteenth-century beginnings as a park originally carved from the wilderness north of downtown Seattle to promote a nearby real estate development. As Seattle grew, its zoo engendered civic pride and the animals in its growing collection became local personalities. By the 1970s, the zoo emerged as an international pioneer in zoo design. Lavishly illustrated, Woodland provides a narrative of changing ideas about the relationship between humans and animals, and a fond look at the zoo's animals and the people who care for them.

Woodland: The Story of the Animals and People of Woodland Park Zoo

HistoryLink, Staff of

Bierlein, John

Why does a city surrounded by water need another waterway? Find out what drove Seattle's civic leaders to pursue the dream of a Lake Washington Ship Canal for more than sixty years and what role it has played in the region's development over the past century. Historians Jennifer Ott and David B. Williams, author of Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography, explore how industry, transportation, and the very character of the city and surrounding region developed in response to the economic and environmental changes brought by Seattle's canal and locks.

Waterway: The Story of Seattle's Locks and Ship Canal

Williams, David B.

Ott, Jennifer

Ever since the first streetcars rumbled through the streets of Seattle in 1884, public transportation in the Puget Sound region has been a wild roller-coaster ride, replete with scandals, triumphs, and momentous turning points. A complete rail transit system crisscrossed the region during the trolley days, only to be dismantled by 1941. After seventy years of turmoil―and traffic congestion―a new system, Sound Transit, arose in its place. The story is not just about trolleys, trains, and buses―it is also about the making and breaking of mayors and the way that Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett developed from the 1880s to today.

Transit: The Story of Public Transportation in the Puget Sound Region

Kershner, Jim

In the midst of galloping growth at the turn of the twentieth century, Seattle's city leaders seized on the confluence of a roaring economy with the City Beautiful movement to hire the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm to design a park and parkway system. Their 1903 plan led to a supplemental plan, a playground plan, numerous park and boulevard designs, changes to park system management, and a ripple effect, as the Olmsted Brothers were hired to design public and private landscapes throughout the region. The park system shaped Seattle's character and continues to play a key role in the city's livability today.

Olmsted in Seattle: Creating a Park System for a Modern City

Seattle has packed a lot of history into the 150 years since its incorporation. Much of that history―the stories, the people, dialogue and debate, conflict and vision―is preserved in the Seattle Municipal Archives. The collection's documents, maps, photographs, and ephemera bear witness to the texture, color, and voices of an ever growing and changing city. The 150 artifacts highlighted in this book illustrate a transformed geography, developed and redeveloped neighborhoods, and waves of city-defining immigration and emigration. They show us how the city's psyche and its physical and social landscape―its aspirations―are shaped. The steady push and pull of community organizers and civic leaders, and the everyday needs of the people who call this place home, give Seattle its remarkable spirit, just as they have since its first cornerstones were pounded into place on the shores of Elliott Bay.

Seattle at 150: Stories of the City through 150 Objects from the Seattle Municipal Archives

A Will to Serve: Stories of Patience, Persistence, and Friends Made Along the Way

Biographies & Memoirs

Ellis, Jim

Historical

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