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Historical Notes |
The Pike Place Market, with its familiar neon-lit clock and brass pig, is a renowned Seattle landmark, attracting millions of tourists and locals every year. Its historic, cultural, and social value is rarely underestimated at the end of the twentieth century, but it was not ever thus. Since the market was created in 1907, plans to raze it and replace it with more "modern" facilities have been repelled several times. Thanks to the efforts of architect-activists like Victor Steinbrueck (1911-1985) and artists like Mark Tobey (1890-1976), the Market, with its street level stalls and subterranean warren of shops, retains its character as an outlet for farmers, craftspeople, merchants, restaurateurs, and performers.
The area beneath the Main Market's neon sign and giant clock (ca. 1930) became Seattle's answer to London's Speaker's Corner, as socialists, communists, evangelists, technocrats, and just plain crackpots harangued the milling crowds. When Mark Tobey returned from England in 1938, he was drawn like a magnet to the Market's bubbling cauldron of races, classes, and creeds. He dedicated much of the next two decades to capturing it on paper and canvas while developing his "white writing" style.
In 1963, under the banner of the Central Association, the downtown business establishment unveiled a plan to raze the old nest of buildings and alleys and replace them with terraced garages and high-rise office buildings. By 1964, the "Pike Plaza Redevelopment Project" was integrated into Seattle's first application for federal Urban Renewal funds. City Council member Wing Luke (1925-1965) quietly urged attorney Robert Ashley, architect Victor Steinbrueck, and Allied Arts to organize a public effort to take over the market before the bulldozers shifted into high gear.
In September 1964, Ashley and Steinbrueck invited 60 sympathizers to a champagne breakfast at Lowell's Cafe in the Market to defend what architect Fred Bassetti called "an honest place in a phony time." The new group called itself "Friends of the Market" and sold books, buttons, and shopping bags to raise funds. The support of influential friends such as Mark Tobey stayed the wrecking ball temporarily. But the City's 1968 demolition of the old National Guard Armory on Western fed fears that the Market was next. Anxieties were not calmed when Mayor Dorm Braman denounced the Market as "a decadent, somnolent firetrap."
The City scaled back its urban renewal ambitions, but from the Friends point of view, the concessions were trivial. Steinbrueck then engineered a masterstroke of creative "obstructionism" when he convinced Washington's new Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, created by the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, to approve a 17-acre Pike Place Market Historic District that would block use of federal funds for demolition. The establishment counterattacked by persuading the Advisory Council to shrink the District to a mere 1.7 acres. In May 1971, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave the green light for urban renewal.
The Friends then took to the streets with an initiative creating a 7-acre preservation zone, administered by a Market Historical Commission with broad powers for preserving not only the Market's physical structure but also its social and economic character. In three weeks, they collected 25,000 signatures to qualify the initiative for the November 2, 1971 ballot. Mayor Wes Uhlman and the City Council offered an alternative for a smaller historic district and weaker enforcement, and this gained the support of some prominent Market merchants, such as deli owner Pete De Laurenti, who feared that the Market would stagnate without federal aid. The campaign became a war between competing Market "saviors" but the voters sided with the Friends by 76,369 to 53,264. [Source: History Link -- http://www.historylink.org] |
