Port of Seattle
The Port of Seattle is a public agency based in King County, Washington. It oversees the seaport of Seattle as well as Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. With a portfolio of properties ranging from parks and waterfront real estate, to one of the largest airports and container terminals on the West Coast, the Port of Seattle is one of the Pacific Northwest's leading economic engines.
Its creation was approved by the voters of King County on September 5, 1911, and authorized by the Port District Act. The Port of Seattle is managed by a five-member Port Commission who are elected at large by the voters of King County and serve four-year terms. The Commissioners govern the Port, lead all inter-governmental functions, and oversee the Executive Director.
History
Over the course of more than a century, the Port of Seattle has provided facilities for an expansion of Seattle's shipping trade, later including container shipping and the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, and helped to generate increasing economic activity in the area. Although the Second World War halted much of the global shipping trade and negatively impacted the economy, Seattle again became a major port after the war.Creation
At the time of the creation of the Port of Seattle as an institution, Seattle was already a major port. However, its Central Waterfront was somewhat chaotic, due in part to having eight more or less parallel railroad tracks along the ill-maintained wooden planking of Railroad Avenue. Although the 1903–1906 construction of the Great Northern Tunnel through downtown had alleviated some of the chaos because trains that were merely passing through no longer needed to use the waterfront route, it did not change the basic fact that this "avenue" along the Central Waterfront was wide, built over water, difficult to traverse, and separated Downtown from the piers. To further complicate matters, tracks were owned by three separate private corporations, the Great Northern Railway, the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the Pacific Coast Company, which operated the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad.Furthermore, the railroad companies owned the piers and warehouses where the rails and ships came together, inevitably creating an anti-competitive effect for other businesses wishing to ship through Seattle.
As early as 1890, Virgil Bogue had proposed public ownership not only of the Seattle port, but of all ports in the then newly formed state. As part of gaining statehood, Washington had gained control over its own coastal waters, previously under direct federal control. Initially, it looked like Bogue might prevail, at least with respect to Seattle, but Thomas Burke and others representing the railroad interests managed to stall the initial Harbor Lines Commission plan into oblivion through a series of legal actions. Still, Bogue continued to win allies among populists, progressives, the labor movement, and even some of the railroads. Among the more prominent allies were City Engineer Reginald H. Thomson and his one-time assistant George F. Cotterill. Cotterill went on to serve as a state senator and later as mayor of Seattle. Even before the Port was established, the latter two scored several victories simply by devising plans that made enough sense that the railroads and others adopted them more or less voluntarily. Additionally, Cotterill as a state senator led a state-level effort to authorize port districts, though he was out of office by the time it came to fruition.
In 1910, pressure toward public ownership of port facilities increased when Tacoma, Washington began building the state's first municipally owned dock. Even The Seattle Times, normally opposed to municipal ownership, began to advocate for similar measures in Seattle. On March 14, 1911, the Port District Act became state law, allowing the formation of port districts.
The Port of Seattle was created by the state of Washington in 1911. Under the Port District Act, the port's construction plan had to be presented and voted upon before construction could start. One of the biggest factors that swayed the votes in favor of creating the port was the prospect of economic growth, especially given the impending 1914 completion of the Panama Canal. The first Commission Report for 1912 records that: "The Port of Seattle came into existence on September 5, 1911, by a vote of the people of the Port District held on that date in accordance with the Port District Act of March 14, 1911. The work of the commission for the first six months was confined almost entirely to the preparation of projects which were duly approved by the people at a special election held on March 5, 1912."
Early development
From the first, the Port of Seattle was faced with the fact that most of the key properties on the Central Waterfront on Elliott Bay were already in the hands of the railroads and other vested interests. This meant that most Port-owned facilities would be in more peripheral areas: to the south, the newly dredged East Waterway of the Duwamish between the newly filled mainland Industrial District and the newly created Harbor Island; to the north, where the Great Northern Railway occupied only part of Smith Cove; and north in Ballard, newly annexed to Seattle, where Salmon Bay would form the outlet of the new Lake Washington Ship Canal connecting Lake Washington and Lake Union to salt water.The Port commissioned the first automobile ferry in Western Washington, Leschi, which launched December 6, 1913. The Leschi operated on Lake Washington, providing service from Leschi Park to two locations on the east side of the lake. Earlier that year, Port construction began with the creation of a home port for Puget Sound fishermen; Fishermen's Terminal on Salmon Bay was completed in 1914 and has been the U.S. Northern Pacific Fishing Fleet's home for operations, provisioning and repairs ever since. Work also began that year on a grain terminal at South Hanford Street on the East Waterway, intended to give Washington growers an alternative to shipping their grain down the Columbia River to Portland, Oregon.
Another project begun in 1913, the Bell Street Terminal, the Port's new headquarters near the north end of the Central Waterfront, loaded its first cargo October 28, 1913 while the warehouse facilities were still under construction, and by 1914 served much of the Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet and provided easy access for farmers around Puget Sound to bring their produce to Pike Place Market. A viaduct to Pike Place Market and a rooftop park, solarium, and pool were added in 1915. "but by the 1920s, the park had developed an unsavory reputation and was closed."
Other early Port projects included cold storage facilities at Bell Street Terminal for local fishermen and on the East Waterway at South Spokane Street for Eastern Washington farmers, as well as two massive piers at Smith Cove. Pier A, later Pier 40 and Pier 90 was long and wide. It was the largest pier in the world until the construction of Pier B, later Pier 41 and Pier 91, longer.
Stagnation in the 1920s and 1930s
A more conservative Port Commission in the 1920s largely put an end to new initiatives of this sort. Trade continued to grow slowly, with an emphasis on China and Japan, but other West Coast and Gulf Coast ports increasingly copied Seattle's initiatives of the prior decade, and the Port of Tacoma in particular undercut Seattle on prices. A price war through the 1920s resulted in a 1929 agreement through the American Association of Port Authorities to set uniform wharf rates.Seattle and the state of Washington were not well-positioned coming into the Great Depression that began in 1929. Due to over-fishing and excessive logging, the natural resources that had provided much of the basis for the local economy were being depleted. The salmon catch was down below a tenth of what it had been in the peak year, 1913, and timber production was also significantly down even before the national economy began to tumble. By October 1931, low-rent housing in Seattle was oversaturated, and a Hooverville began to form in the abandoned Skinner & Eddy land along Elliott Bay, site of present-day Terminal 46. In its first few months it was twice removed by Seattle Police
"sweeps," but eventually a compromise was reached that allowed a shantytown to persist for almost a decade.
World War II and after
The economic depression and labor troubles of the 1930s were followed by the wartime economy of World War II. Even before the U.S. entered the war, export of scrap metal to Japan, of course, went to zero, and export of Eastern Washington apples to Europe fared little better, but with the Soviet Union newly an ally, Seattle became a base for trans-oceanic shipping to Siberia. The Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation on Harbor Island scored contracts to build 45 destroyers, which put it in a tie with Bethlehem Steel San Francisco for largest purely military ship production on the U.S. West Coast. The U.S. Navy took over the massive Smith Cove piers. The state legislature granted the Port of Seattle and other port authorities around the state exceptional powers to pursue defense-related projects without requiring the public to vote on the bond issues, which enabled the port to purchase additional land on the Harbor Island side of the East Waterway and to pursue major projects on the mainland side: Pier 42, with its pilings as high as, and a new grain elevator at South Hanford Street.U.S. entry into the war brought on further changes: effectively, the entire harbor on Elliott Bay became a U.S. military port for the duration. The Pacific Steamship Company piers south of Downtown were reworked into a Port of Embarkation. One of the longest-lasting legacies of the war years was the comprehensive May 1, 1944 renumbering of all of Seattle's Elliott Bay piers into a single system encompassing the bay.
While the War years were a boom time for Seattle and its port, the immediate postwar years were not. Wartime production had made Seattle-based Boeing the region's largest employer; peace resulted in 70,000 Boeing layoffs. Nor did Seattle's port get its expected share of post-war commercial shipping traffic: for the first time ever, it was outdone even by its neighbor to the south, the far smaller city of Tacoma. While the Port of Seattle had launched what was to prove a very successful airport, wartime use of the Elliott Bay and Duwamish River waterfront had not established a particularly good basis for a peacetime port. When the military's new piers reverted to civilian use, they took business away from existing older facilities and, consequently, away from the heart of town. Further, it had been over a decade since the Port had run a major national and international publicity campaign. And there were labor troubles.
The Port was not entirely without a strategy. On the shore of the area around Pioneer Square and immediately south, they purchased and modernized Piers 43 and 45 through 49 from the Pacific Coast Company Piers 43, 45, 46, and 47 were eventually incorporated into present-day Terminal 46. Fishermen's Terminal at Salmon Bay was enlarged and upgraded, as was the East Waterway Dock on Harbor Island. Still, they failed to support Eastern Washington farmers with a modern grain terminal, and that trade was lost, for the time, to Portland and Tacoma.
In 1949 the U.S. Department of Commerce designated a foreign-trade zone on Harbor Island. At the urging of the local business community, the Port invested heavily in gaining this designation and in building the facility, but it almost certainly turned out to be a money-loser over the next few decades. FTZ status was vastly expanded in 1989, encompassing virtually all of the Port's seaport and airport acreage, a much better proposition than the single small facility.