A History of Business

Like many American cities, Seattle was built for the purpose of making money.

Oh sure, we may prattle on about our gorgeous setting and being in touch with our natural surroundings and all the other clichés of tourism promotion.

But let’s not kid ourselves—the business of Seattle, and its reason for existence, was always business.

From the first moments European and American settlers landed on the shores of Puget Sound and sized up the opportunities, there were fish to be caught, trees to be cut and milled, railroads to be built, Klondike-bound miners to be supplied, planes to be assembled, software programs to be written, cups of coffee to be brewed—always something that some sharp-eyed person could capitalize on.

Not that making money’s necessarily a bad motivation. This pursuit of economic activity worked well in providing middle-class lives to many and upper-class fortunes to a few. OK, so it wasn’t such a hot deal for the Native Americans who got shoved out of the way. But these days, even they’ve figured an angle by which to separate people from their money—the casino.

Yet the reminders of our business and industrial heritage are relatively invisible, even when, in the physical sense like office towers or airplane assembly buildings, they’re anything but. Heck, most of us work in that world and never give much thought about how it, and we, got here.

Which is why a series of brochures tracing the industrial, agricultural and maritime heritage of this region provides such a valuable service in cataloging some of the physical evidence and remnants of that history, as well as a potential do-it-yourself bit of local tourism for those at all curious about it.

The brochures are the work of the Destination Heritage project of 4Culture, King County’s agency dedicated to the arts and historic preservation. These visitors’ guides can be picked up from racks of regional tourism information, or ordered through or downloaded from a website (www.destinationheritage.org).

The industrial guide includes museums, neighborhoods, trails, parks—what is Gas Works Park but an industrial site, one of the few you can wander through?—train stations, bridges and trestles, all of which “represent the spirit of innovation that has shaped the region’s economy and landscape for over 150 years,” the brochure states.

The agriculture brochure includes markets (Pike Place, most notably), farms and gardens, wineries, a hop shed from back when hops were a big local commodity, even the grain elevators along Elliott Bay. The maritime brochure covers lighthouses, the Seattle central waterfront, Fisherman’s Terminal and the Ballard locks, making the assertion that “Puget Sound history is maritime history.”

Indeed it is, but it’s also industrial and agricultural history, and it’s also the legacy of office work, if anyone ever gets around to putting up monuments to the heritage of the cubicle dweller. It matters that all of these examples are what our history is.

The brochures and their suggested tours aren’t only an opportunity to drag your kids away from the video games and have them learn something, although that might not be such a difficult task; boats and trains and planes and farms are just plain cool in the eyes of kids. The more removed we are from our business, transportation and agricultural roots, the less we understand how the food we eat and the products we use got to us in the shape they’re in, and the less we understand about policy debates that affect those sectors.

Increasingly, we have fewer opportunities to see that side of our world. Industrial tours and real-life glimpses into the inner workings of business and industry are rare enough these days beyond, say, the Boeing tour, the Microsoft visitor center and the viewing platforms to watch Port of Seattle activity. With businesses growing more nervous about industrial espionage, terrorism, vandalism and liability, those glimpses will become even rarer.

The danger is that understanding how the world works will become rarer, too. The industrial, ag and maritime heritage of this region isn’t just our past, it’s our present and likely our future as well. As we confront the difficult questions of how we’ll make a buck tomorrow, it wouldn’t hurt to know how it was done yesterday.

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