The Great White Fair

This year marks the centennial of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which was held at the University of Washington from June through October 1909 — and which nearly four million people attended.

A close copy of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the A-Y-P was a national spectacle of technology, architecture and racism that changed Seattle forever.

Though it may read like one, try to remember that this is not a dream.

It is 1909 in Seattle. Hordes of people have converged on the University of Washington campus to see a number of things: a cow sculpted out of almonds; babies displayed in incubators; Jimi Hendrix’s grandparents performing in a Dixieland band. Henry Ford jumps up and down as a Model T zooms up to UW’s Drumheller Fountain, winning a four-thousand-mile cross-country race. Cowboys and Indians face off in a Wild West show. Ladies in hats piled with giant plumes bump around and around on the “Tickler” (like Disneyland’s Mad Hatter teacups ride, but using gravity instead of motors). Prospectors shout over hundreds of heads, trying to make real their tall tales from the Alaskan gold rush. An airship hovers above the grounds — a maze of freshly built structures gleaming with white stucco detailing. And a massive white statue of the world’s last bare-knuckled boxer looms over of one of many passing parades.

It is the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s first world’s fair, designed by the Olmsted brothers. The masterminds behind Yosemite, the White House grounds and even Volunteer Park, they spent two years designing and building what would be advertised around the country as the “Most Beautiful Exposition.”

An illustrated poster depicts a bird's-eye view of the exposition grounds, courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society; (inset, clockwise from left) Women attending the fair pose for an amusing portrait, © Museum of History and Industry; the official seal of the A-Y-P; the illustrated cover of an exposition publication, courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society.

Now that Seattle is one of the most literate and moved-to cities in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine it strapping on a sandwich board to sell itself like this. But city fathers knew that when the Klondike gold streams ran dry, Seattle would need a new illusion of adventure and promise to lure people to the far frontier of the Pacific Northwest. The exhibition seal depicts three women — one Asian and two white — each offering up symbols of industry and progress. Thus, Seattle was promoted as a portal to the mystical Orient, the best destination for the railroad coming from the East, and a stopping point on the way to the bountiful gold rush to the north.

This year marks the centennial of the A-Y-P, and whether you’ve noticed or not, Seattle is all over it. The celebration officially launches May 22 at the Northwest Folklife Festival, but events have been going on all year. It is perhaps one of the least centralized events to ever hit the city, which is possibly why my friends — some native to Seattle — tilt their heads in curiosity whenever I talk about it.

Michael Herschensohn, program manager for the A-Y-P centennial, gave me a personal tour of the UW campus to explain what the fair meant to Seattleites in 1909 and to point out the vestiges of its original infrastructure.

Crowds walk before the buildings on the A-Y-P grounds; all photos courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society.

The quintessential professor type, he begins with a lesson about vanished architecture: seventy buildings were erected for the exposition. They were supposed to permanently expand the UW campus, but, he explains, “world’s fairs are all smoke and mirrors architecturally.” Built with cheap materials, most of the structures didn’t survive beyond 1960.

Yet there are still traces, if you know where to look. Herschensohn tromps through flower beds to point out the wooden skirting of UW’s Cunningham Hall and knocks on the walls in the faculty lounge of the “Husky Den,” where some original wood paneling still survives. He snaps pictures of the architecture building — the one original A-Y-P structure that remains. Other remnants are two busts made by sculptor Finn Frolich and the “Foundry” (now the UW engineering annex). Turns out I walked past all of these every day I was in grad school at UW and didn’t notice. Sometimes history stays hidden if you’re not trampling flowerbeds to look for it.

Besides the sheer physical accomplishment that was A-Y-P, the fair also appealed to turn-of-the-century American curiosity about “exotic” cultures.

America’s nearest neighbor to Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific islands, Seattle held a monopoly on the frontier du jour then: the “Far East.” This led to some infamously racist displays at A-Y-P. White visitors paid to watch indigenous peoples of many nations eat, make crafts, give presentations and sometimes just sit around. Along the amusement strip, there were the Eskimo Village, the Chinese Village, Tokio and the Formosa Tea House. The best documented in historical photographs are Igorot peoples squatting in front of makeshift villages, on display like objects in a museum. One photo (on display at MOHAI) depicts a young woman kneeling in front of one of the flimsy exhibits, which has a dirt floor and primitive-looking wooden walls. A sign hangs behind her: “Typical Rich Man’s House.” These displays were some of the fair’s best-selling attractions.

Revisiting such uncomfortable parts of our history — and working to understand them better — is a driving theme behind this centennial. Workshops, community projects and lecture symposia on various topics are already underway (see aype.org).

Eric Taylor, heritage lead at 4Culture (a major sponsor, along with the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs) points out that it’s no accident that the centennial lacks one focal point. “I realized early on that this celebration really has a grassroots approach,” he says. “This is fitting because [A-Y-P] involved so many aspects of the area’s history.” It’s by nature an event that moves between the small and the large; it isn’t one big show but a series of happenings, remembrances, rediscoveries.

So don’t hold your breath for a banquet, or even a Ferris wheel. This is a librarian’s dream. Historians (both professional and amateur), archivists, retirees and curious bystanders are all digging into local archives, dusting off artifacts, setting up colorful displays, blogging and attending and giving lectures.

One A-Y-P participant is cataloging the “bigwigs” present at the fair. Henry Ford, M. Robert Guggenheim, President Taft and Ezra Meeker (Puyallup royalty known for his activism on behalf of American Indians) all visited at various times with various agendas.

Shanna Stevenson, Women’s History Consortium coordinator for the Washington State Historical Society, has a particular interest in the women’s suffrage activists at A-Y-P (just a year before women won the vote in Washington). “I would have wanted to be [there] on July 7, 1909,” she says. “To see Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Dr. Cora Smith Eaton, Alice Stone Blackwell and others while a ‘Votes for Women’ kite hovered over the grounds. Later, I would have enjoyed the evening as described in The History of Woman Suffrage: ‘the fairy-like spectacle of the Exposition by night, with every building outlined in electric lights, the pools shimmering, the fountain gleaming and a series of cascades coming down in foam, with electric lights of different colors glowing through each waterfall.’”

Exposition photographer Frank H. Nowell captures three white women in American Indian costume, 1909, courtesy of the Special Collections Division, UW Libraries.

Stevenson touches on another driving force behind the A-Y-P centennial: the energy behind it is the energy of trying to imagine one’s way back in time. At the Eastside Heritage Center, I saw a woman scribbling away in the stacks. She’s tracing the journey of Olga Carlson, a nine-year-old girl who visited A-Y-P with her grandfather, a Swedish immigrant. In an essay written for school, the young girl describes a boat ride and a scenic railroad trip. She even saw a real lion and “heard many people sing.”

There are reenactors, of course — for them, A-Y-P is as good as it gets. Reliving the famous ocean-to-ocean car race, fifty Model Ts will arrive at Drumheller Fountain around July 13 after tracing historical routes all the way from White Plains, New York. Around the same time, a pack of cyclists will follow the route two teenagers took in 1909 from Santa Rosa, California. Fresh out of high school, the young men cycled one thousand miles in fifty-four days to reach A-Y-P. 4Culture hopes to greet participating cyclists with a special “green” display in the spirit of A-Y-P’s Seattle-brand trade show — expect a lineup of cutting-edge Priuses and samples of hydroponic wheatgrass.

Ultimately, this celebration of A-Y-P is a testament to local nostalgia — and the lengths to which people are willing to go to save things: any trinket can become an artifact in the right hands. At MOHAI, the Washington State History Museum and the Eastside Heritage Center’s Winters House, you can spy endless strange ephemera: the gold medal that Merlino won for its olive oil company, dolls labeled “Lucky Eskimo Babies,” haunting photographs of American Indian children in Victorian dress, the first “wireless” phone. Pins, medals, hair combs and photo albums, all stamped with the A-Y-P logo. Hand mirrors, plates, personal postcards, ribbons and hand-painted dresses created to commemorate the event. All these artifacts come from local and personal collections — and many will go back to their owners when the temporary exhibitions close around the end of this year. After that we can hope they’ll be passed down from hand to hand, and maybe (if we don’t recycle all of it) resurface for the bicentennial. •