Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The War Years
Seattle's boom continued through WWI, when Northwest lumber was in great demand.
The opening of the Panama Canal brought increased trade to Pacific ports, which were
free from wartime threats. Shipyards opened along Puget Sound, bringing the ship-
building industry close to the forests of the Northwest.
WWII brought other, less positive, developments to Seattle. About 7000 Japanese
residents in Seattle and the nearby areas were forcibly removed from their jobs and
homes. They were sent to the nearby 'relocation center,' or internment camp, in Puyal-
lup, then on to another camp in Idaho where they were detained under prison conditions
for the duration of the war. This greatly depleted the Japanese community, which up to
this point had built a thriving existence farming and fishing in Puget Sound. In all, an
estimated 110,000 Japanese across the country, two-thirds of whom were US citizens,
were sent to internment camps. Upon their release, many declined to return to the
homes they'd been forced to abandon.
Boeing & Postwar Seattle
The Boeing Airplane Company, started in 1917, was founded and named by William E
Boeing and his partner, Conrad Westervelt. (Boeing tested his first plane, the
B&W,
in
June 1916 by taking off from the middle of Lake Union.) For years, Boeing single-
handedly ruled Seattle industry. After WWII, the manufacturer diversified its product
line and began to develop civilian aircraft. In 1954 Boeing announced the 707, and the
response was immediate and overwhelming. The world found itself at the beginning of
an era of mass air travel, and Boeing produced the jets that led this revolution in trans-
portation. By 1960, when the population of Seattle topped one million, one in 10 people
worked for Boeing, and one in four people worked in jobs directly affected by Boeing.
But the fortunes of Boeing weren't always to soar. A combination of overstretched
capital (due to cost overruns in the development of the 747) and a cut in defense spend-
ing led to a severe financial crisis in the early 1970s, known as the 'Boeing Bust.' Boe-
ing was forced to cut its workforce by two-thirds; in one year, nearly 60,000 Seattleites
lost their jobs. The local economy went into a tailspin for a number of years.
In the 1980s increased defense spending brought vigor back to aircraft production
lines, and expanding trade relations with Pacific Rim nations brought business to Boe-
ing, too. But, in September 2001, the world's largest airplane manufacturer, the com-
pany as synonymous with Seattle as rain, relocated 50% of its HQ staff to digs in Ch-
