I agree completely. I love world's fairs. I used to live in San Francisco, and there are beautiful parts throughout the city that wouldn't exist without the world's fairs. I was even married at the Palace of Fine Arts (home of the Exploratorium - hey, just like our Pacific Science Center!).

I'd love to host a world's fair with an urban theme. Rather than walking down wide grass covered parks, walk down narrow pedestrian street mazes surrounded by tall buildings acting as street walls. Above the street level retail and restaurants we can built hotels that will be converted to apartments. We can have expositions in spaces that will become Triple Door style theatres. Move people around by street car, light rail, and gondola. We can have it right where the viaduct is (by then, was).

Knute's essay is interesting, but needs balance.

First, since Jane Jacobs's book, DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, American urbanism has generally moved away from isolated collections of buildings in large superblock developments, and has returned to the urbanism of mixed-use streets (with all modes of travel--pedestrians, bicycles, transit, autos, service vehicles, etc.). Jacobs presented anecdotal evidence, but subsequent studies using time-lapse photography by William H. Whyte and others demonstrated the need for compactness, traditional streets with sidewalks, street-related uses, etc. for successful urbanism. Today's sustainable urbanism movement has largely picked up on these same ideas.

Second, Jacobs pointed out the folly of locating public facilities like performance halls, arenas, etc., in clusters cut off from the city. She argued that public investments should be placed so as to support surrounding private investment, and to create mixed-use urban districts rather than single-use enclaves. Again, others have reached similar conclusions. Benaroya Hall, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Central Library are all examples of buildings placed in a mixed-use urban center that have fostered a more active life in the areas of the city around them.

Third, conversion of Seattle Center to an accessible urban park has faced a major challenge in creating permeable and accessible edges. As a World's Fair the site was fenced/walled with a limited number of entry points. Many facilities were designed to face inward--to serve the crowds already inside. Since the Fair became a park and the walls came down, many facilities have gradually been revised to provide access from nearby streets (for example the Pacific Science Center entrance on Denny). The challenge has since become, how do such facilities orient both to the adjacent public streets and sidewalks, and simultaneously support the interior spaces of the Center?

Finally, Knute points to the monorail as a successful example of public transit. The success of the monorail is peculiar to its configuration--it is a point-to point system providing a link between only two destinations. It addresses none of the complexities of serving a broad urbanized region of varying densities.

Knute cites UW Professor John Findlay's book which argues that Seattle Center brought suburban planning ideas to the central city. Most observers would likely agree with Findlay's analysis.

Century 21 was a remarkable event. It brought the region together. The name "Century 21" suggests the fair represented what people in the 1950s and early 1960s thought our present century would be like. As a model of urbanism, I suggest it presents quite mixed lessons.

Knute, listen to me man. are you listening? Knute, the 60's ended 41 years ago man.

"Seattle" and "big ideas" in the same sentence? In 2011? What parallel universe do you live in, Mr. Berger?

I kept waiting for the positive urban vision represented by Century 21 but nearly every one of your points seemed to back up Danny Westneat's column.

I like the Seattle Center despite its flaws (several of which you enumerate here), but I think it represents a poor legacy for the future. I would list its positive impacts as intangible: it was an optimistic vision of the future, and we've lost that sense that we can make a better world on a large scale. On the other hand, one can argue that it represented a misplaced optimism that made the city worse in many ways. And if you contrast our post-fair progress to Vancouver's evolution since its 1986 fair, it's not even a close contest. They made a lot more of their opportunity--just compare SkyTrain to the monorail to start.

Extend the monorail to Green Lake and bring back the waterfront trolleys.

Why do today's ersatz visionaries feel compelled to push people around like pieces on a chessboard, rather than attract them, voluntarily, towards a desirable future?

Seattle is probably less "big idea" oriented that our peers.

Vancouver has a recent world's fair and Olympics. Lots of highrise zoning. Lots of rail transit. Major redevelopment initiatives at False Creek (Expo site, Athlete's Village site) and elsewhere around town, such as TODs far more aggressive than anything we see here.

Portland has SoWa and the Pearl, and a lot more rail transit. They moved their waterfront freeway across the river, de facto.

LA, SF, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, the list goes on.

Back to the Seattle Center: Give the surrounding neighborhoods more density and reduce the barriers created by Aurora and to a lesser extent Denny (fix some "no crossing" spots?) and it would be far more integrated with the city and neighborhood. And put light rail close by on its way to Ballard. Even today I find it easy to get to for my Sunday morning grande mochas.

We need some car-free areas. This is a good one.

It's true that Century 21 brought suburban ideas to the city, but it also emphasized urban ones (mass transit, pedestrianism, the arts). It is too simplistic to see it simply as only or mostly suburban, which in urban-speak almost always connotes failure. Jeffrey Ochsner is right that it's a mixed legacy. Seattle Center isn't perfect by any means, by Jane Jacobs standards or anyone else's, and some of its urban ambitions failed.

Still, as was noted many times in the planning phase for the fair, the simple fact that it was built in the middle of a major late 20th-century city was considered a modern innovation (as was its small, compact size). The "jewel box" fair was bucking a nearly century-long trend of U.S. fairs designed to build parks or open undeveloped tracts. Seattle redeveloped an already existing urban neighborhood in order to keep the center city vital, much as urbanists now look at redoing the Waterfront. A truly suburban fair would have chosen a suburban location, and many were proposed (and rejected) including tracts on the Eastside and the south King county. The Issaquah World's Fair wasn't to be.

In many respects, the more important point for urbanists is that the fair was unrivaled in its time as a mobilization force for big-city consciousness. If you study press accounts after the fair, there is a steady bipartisan drumbeat for regional urban planning and for re-organizing the metroplex. That urban organism was displayed in a powerful diorama in the Washington Coliseum which showed Seattle in the year 2000 as a large Pugetopolis linked by mass transit. Following it came a warning from planners and academics that without more density and better regional planning and transportation, we would wind up like Los Angeles, sprawling and smoggy.

Through the world's fair, a method was found to stimulate an unusual unity of urban purpose: labor, business, political, arts leaders, and the citizenry. If one can criticize the specifics of Century 21's legacy it's fair to point out that it also offers city-builders a kind of blueprint for how to pursue urban goals that are still elusive. This isn't nostalgia for the 1960s: cities In Europe and Asia are still using fairs regularly to accomplish urban improvements with a formula for which Seattle was once a role model.

I don't know how many commenters actually went to Century 21 or were even alive then, but those who did go didn't think of it as the world of the future. It was simply a fun place to go. The monorail was rather thrilling but we didn't think of it as the urban transportation of the future. Most of those ideas are 2011 looking backwards, not 1962 at itself.

One gets the sense that Knute is stuck in "Century 21." Just out of curiosity, how many articles on Seattle Center and the Fair have you published over the last two years, Knute? The Fair was important, but it was 50 years ago. As a focus of Seattle's civic culture and civic debate, it seems to me that the Center moved away from Seattle's focus of attention about 25 years ago. City government and policy makers seem more focused on Belltown, Ballard, South Lake Union, SoDo, and other cultural hot zones.

And surely Forward Thrust and other public policy initiatives deserve some analysis? I know, I know, it's the Fair's 50th anniversary. But a lot has happened in Seattle since then, most of it (including Gates and Allen and their investments) only tenuously connected to the Fair.

To be sure, the Fair was an intriguing glimpse of a "what if?" future for Seattle and the region. But the reality is we didn't get a mass transit system until Sound Transit light rail, which is OK (better than nothing) but more than a day late and a dollar short in terms of impact.

As Knute points out, the Fair happened because of powerful and influential citizens operating without the public inputs that are statutorily required these days. Because the "process" has now become an end in and of itself I doubt that anything big will ever get done again in Seattle beyond fixing potholes. (And that will only get done if Seattle has a mayor who is not anti-car.)

If the Seattle area were more unified in vision, i.e., an overwhelming belief in rail transit (or some form of fixed right-of-way transit), or an overarching belief in growth management and urban density, Knute's article and this following commentary would be moot. But Seattle is hopelessly divided among Eastside and Westside, urban and suburban, and no-growth greens versus economic boosters. I don't see how this area will ever move forward without a majority vision that embraces a growth economy AND a sustainable, environmentally friendly metropolis that includes transit. Perhaps it can't be done.

"In the run-up to the fair, the city and organizers massively built new parking lots to accommodate the expected millions of visitors...."

I hate to burst your Bubbleator, but these parking lots weren't "built." It would be more accurate to note that existing neighborhoods were flattened so that fairgoers would have places to park.

If you're suggesting that planners need to pay more attention to the din of suburban residents clamoring for more cheap parking in the city center, please be advised that the plea for more space for Canyoneros has been duly noted.

That's an awfully sweeping generalization, isn't it?

I went to the fair. I was three years old. Some of my earliest vivid memories are from that trip, the first time my parents and I ventured further afield into the broader world than an occasional trip to Rhodes Brothers department store in Tacoma. It did seem like the future, in fact it made me think of the future for the first time as something beyond "How long 'til Stan Boreson is on?" I went to the Seattle Center again a couple years later, and then on a field trip in the fifth grade. Back then, many of the Fair exhibits were still there, especially in the Science Center. That really cemented my interest in technology. The future promised us in the 60s was bright and cheerful and fun and I wanted to be a part of it more than anything. The future we got sucks.

Well, that's a little harsh, but it certainly is a future of diminished expectations. It's really too bad. Reality cheated us. But unlike a lot of people, I still believe that the future can be a better place. We just have to have the will to make it so. And that's the life's lesson I took away from the Fair.

With Sonics crowds long gone, it would be hard to make the case for more parking today. Sonics games, along with whatever events were at the same time, were presumably the lion's share of the peak times. Today, except for major festivals, the normal peak times must be Storm+Opera+plays, or maybe 4,000 cars total to make a wild guess (even assuming low transit usage for evening events). The three main garages (south of Key, Gates, and megablock by MOM) might be 60% of that. The neighborhood has plenty to fill the remainder. God forbid people have to walk four or five blocks. As the neighborhood fills in over time, more transit would help, and maybe some commercial buildings would rent out their garages, as some do near Safeco/Qwest.

On the broader topic, am I the only one who thinks the Center does very well as a jack of all trades? It's a big urban park that's great to walk in, a place for festivals (big ones and little ones of all kinds), a place to get lunch or coffee, a place for grand buildings and uses that want more than single blocks (Science Center for example). As the city grows around its edges it's becoming an everyday draw for more people too, aided by the free or cheap elements, for example the skate park.

Oh, maybe this is sort of a tangental thought, but I have to admit I have deep misgivings about "city building" via world's fairs. It's another way of accomplishing the misguided urban-renewal dreams that were so popular in the sixties and the seventies.

I'm just a tad too young to remember Century 21 -- my mother tells me she rode the monorail when she was pregnant, so I guess I was there. But my real memories are of growing up in Spokane, a once-beautiful city filled with imposing brick structures where parking lots stand today. I remember when they demolished two of the city's three remarkable train depots for Expo '74. Seemed like about a third of the downtown area was flattened for Expo parking. Wrecking balls were everywhere in the summer of '73. At the time the destruction was welcomed by city officials and Chamber-of-Commerce types. Out with the old, in with the new. Many of those buildings were poorly maintained or vacant, of course, because the owners couldn't see economic value in maintaining them. But even at age 12 I had to wonder what would be left of the city when the fair went away.

Thirty-seven years later the downtown area still seems like one of those bombed-out European cities after WWII, once they cleared the rubble away and only a few buildings here and there were left standing. If it hadn't been for Expo, I think considerably more of downtown's infrastructure would have survived, and the mass of low-rent historic buildings would make Spokane a more vibrant city today. That park in the middle of town? They would have built it anyway by the '80s or the '90s, and by that point I doubt Spokane would have been so eager to destroy its downtown core.

So yeah, I love the Space Needle and the Science Center and the Key Arena and all that other wild Googiness at the Seattle Center. I have no clue what was there before, or whether any of it was worth saving. But growing up in Spokane teaches me there's a danger in "thinking big." We shouldn't salute it unthinkingly.

Excellent comment thread raising many issues.

Sarah90: It's absolutely true that many people who attend world's fairs come away with memories of nothing more than ice cream: Call it the Belgian Waffle syndrome. Like dbrenman, I was not one of those: the fair had a profound impact on my expectations about the future (at age 8). Also, see Paul Allen's section on how the Federal Science exhibit shaped his life. But beyond that, the issue isn't what you or I took away. My point is what the grown-ups discussed, and their serious debates about technology, society, urban planning, the role of science, what kind of city, region and world we were building. And that is in the newspapers, letters, files, government documents, reports, extensive media coverage, debates among scientists, architects, religious leaders, businessmen, etc. over the purpose and potential of the fair. I was too busy eating Belgian waffles to care much then, but the record of the grown-ups is extensive. And yes, the Monorail was intended to demonstrate the new wave in mass transit locally and globally.

Billfromshoreline, I'm writing about the fair a lot because I'm researching a book and delving into that era. But I also believe, now more than ever, that it was a seminal moment in the city's sense of itself, which is a major fascination of mine. Also, I think people in Seattle have lost sight of the impact the fair had here, and its influence in the history of fair's internationally, beyond Seattle Center. I admit to a bias: the subject of world's fairs is of great interest. I've attended seven of them. As I write this, I am at a symposium in San Diego on world's fair history.

TLjr: My point about parking (bulldozed or built) was simply that the fair far exceeded the expectations of planners regarding the use of transit for visitors to get to the fair site. More people took bus or monorail than anyone predicted, the fair thus being more "urban" than anticipated. It turns out the parking for the fair was vastly over-built.

Mhays: I agree with you that the Center works very well as a "jack of all trades." Perfect? No. But a real asset.

Knute, since you must be talking to a lot of people involved in the 50th anniversary, is there any talk of painting the Space Needle in its original colors for the event? And are there any pictures of the diorama from the Coliseum? Sadly, that is one part of the fair I have no memory of, and pictures of the display inside seem to be very scarce.

i wonder if people in paris or rome or barcelona sit around agonising over how to "fix" their cities. lol

Beaky: Well, they certainly used to in Paris, which was dramatically transformed by multiple (at least six) world's fairs which were also used for major urban improvements.

dbreneman: The Needle repainted the top for the 40th; not sure if they'll do it again, but I know the question has come up. As to the diorama, yes, images seem to be extremely scarce. I recently found a pretty good one in an old Seattle Time, but don;t know if they still have the photo. I know another historian in town who is trying to track images of it down.

Looking for images of the fair? You know, newspapers and photo-archives aren't the only source.

Way back in 1982, during the wee hours of the morning one summer week, KING-5 replayed a series of TV specials it produced back in 1962 as the fair approached. Memory is a little hazy, but I think they ran under the title, "The World of Tomorrow" -- I remember something like five segments, each about an hour in length. And of course, they were in black and white (on videotape). These shows were really the most detailed look at the fair I've seen anywhere -- exhibits, interior views, interviews with exhibitors, everything. If only we had this kind of filmed record of the 1909 fair! (and if only I had a VHS recorder in 1982.) I still remember one shot of a tail-finned '57 Ford making a turn while the monorail rushed overhead, and thinking how well the fair's design and theme suited the times. Anyway, I've never seen these programs again in the intervening 29 years, don't know if they're accessible, don't know if they're really "known" to those with an interest in the fair. But for any serious historian of the fair, they're worth a look.

If you want a good read about the Paris Worlds Fair: "Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count" by Jill Jones is an excellent read.

What of course is interesting is all the vested interests lining up against building the tower.

As for the Monorail, had they actually extended it down to Boeing Field back then, we probably would never have built LINK light rail. Instead we would have extended the existing line. Oh well, another missed opportunity.

The Seattle Center is probably my favorite public space in America. It's had an interesting evolution as the Stadium and the Armory building were there before the Fair and there has been much built and improved since. One of the better people interactive public fountains in America too.

One thing that's always puzzled me.

At the time, the monorail was touted as some sort of "new" mode of public transportation.

Apart from one rail rather than two, why is the monorail any different from an old-fashioned elevated train. At the time, what would have been the theoretical advantage of a monorail compared to, say, the Chicago L trains?

It always seemed the same difference to me.

Those belgian waffles were really wonderful. We all made them for parties for the next year.

The Fair actually was called "The World of Tomorrow." Just remembered it when I read ErikSmith's comment. I think people my age (21) took it a lot less seriously than kids Knute's age, or older people). We thought it was rather over-the-top, like the awful science fiction movies of the day, but we had to go several times anyway since it was a Fair and it was in our Town. Seattle did not think of itself as a City then; it was just trying to grow up and thought the Fair would help.