A Revised History of the Port of Seattle: Change as Mantra

It is not an easy task to chronicle the history of something as complex, controversial, essential, and often maddening as the Port of Seattle. As I know from working there, the Port is an organism always evolving, rebuilding, and redefining itself and its place in the community.

The Port has made a worthy effort to bring that history to life. To mark the 75th anniversary of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport this year, the Port commissioned a revision and expansion of an earlier edition of Rising Tides and Tradewinds, which commemorated the Port’s 100th anniversary of its founding in 1911. 

The new edition makes a credible, if often self-congratulatory, effort to acknowledge the challenges of global shipping. It also tells of the Sea-Tac airport, bursting at the seams of its relatively tiny plot of land and surrounded by an economically and ethnically diverse community.

The Port wisely put the writing job in the hands of HistoryLink, the non-profit responsible for invaluable independent research and publications on Washington state’s history. The main contributors were Casey McNerthey, Kit Oldham and Peter Blecha. 

The roots of the Port’s seaport and airport development lay in the Populist movement of the early 20^th Century, whose leaders argued that the public lands should be developed for the community’s benefit and not narrow commercial interests. Those early Port leaders, like those who followed, were committed to growth and business expansion that put Seattle on the map as an international trading hub.

But as they reshaped the land and rivers, they created long-lasting social and environmental impacts that haunt the Port today.

The book acknowledges but does not explore in depth how Seattle’s early white leaders pushed out the native Duwamish tribal members from their ancestral lands. Only in the last few years has the Port and the larger community recognized the adverse impacts of the harbor development on its original inhabitants. 

Seattle and its harbor in the early 20^th Century looked very different than today.  Back then, “competing private railroads dominated the waterfront, a tangle of multiple rail lines, terminals, switches, and spurs leading to a confusion of mostly small, privately owned docks, warehouses, mills, and canneries built over the muddy tide flats of Elliott Bay,” the authors write.

The book details the efforts of forward-thinking engineers and planners such as Virgil Bogue, Reginald Thomson, and George Cotterill to counter railroad opposition and eventually win the public’s approval of the Port District.

The early Port Commissioners built facilities such as Fishermen’s Terminal to provide an affordable home for fishing boats. The Port set dockage rates low and adopted labor-friendly rules unusual for the time.

The economic boom spurred by World War II brought sweeping changes to the region. One of the key developments was a new airport needed to handle Boeing planes being churned out by the thousands. With the offer of $1 million in seed money, local governments were invited to bid on construction. 

The Port of Seattle made the winning offer. Building the airport “is our duty, and if we can do it, we will,” said Commission President Horace Chapman. In 1942 the Commission approved a site on vacant scrubland near Bow Lake. After Tacoma offered $100,000 to assist construction, the new airport was named Seattle-Tacoma Airport – certainly one of the best naming-rights deals in history. 

The choice of the Bow Lake site would have great implications for the future, the book notes. Midway between Seattle and Tacoma, the site was favored by airlines and the cities because of transportation infrastructure. A second proposed site was a rural Eastside location near today’s Lake Hills neighborhood, just three miles from Microsoft’s current headquarters. The region’s landscape would look vastly different today had the Eastside site been chosen. 

The runways and airport were completed in 1944, but it was not until 1946 that regular commercial passenger service was established. Thus began a process of unbroken expansion and remodeling of the runways, terminals, hangars, and cargo warehouses that continues today. The original four-runway layout was replaced with a single north-south runway, with a second runway completed in 1970. At just 2,500 acres, Sea-Tac is among the smallest of the nation’s major airports.

Fifty years ago, as jet travel increased, area residents petitioned the Port to purchase homes and install noise insulation in neighboring communities. In 1976, the Port launched the nation’s first large-scale noise mitigation effort, Sea-Tac Communities Plan.  

For the Port, the 1970s was an era of upheavals in Seattle’s shipping industry, the opening of China to international trade, and airline deregulation that launched the era of low-cost air travel. “A new era was dawning that would at once challenge the Port of Seattle to reinvent itself yet again and cause the people of Seattle to reimagine their beloved town and begin planning for its rapid emergence as a truly world-class city,” write the authors.

In the late 1980s, the Port for the first time made investments outside the aviation and maritime spheres.  The Port bought up derelict properties along the Central Waterfront for construction of a new cruise terminal, conference center, hotel, and condominiums. The first Alaska cruise ship sailed from the Central Waterfront terminal at Pier 66 in 2000. 

The book credits the first two women elected to the Port Commission – Pat Davis in 1986 and Paige Miller in 1988 – with guiding the projects to reality. Commissioner (and later Mayor) Paul Schell also played a key role in shaping the harbor-side developments. Later, the Port would build on its role on the waterfront by contributing $267 million to the demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, replacing it with a 1.7-mile tunnel.   

Seattle and the Port made an ambitious bid for the global stage by hosting the World Trade Organization in 1999 at the Washington State Convention Center. The agenda was to develop policies for expansion of international trade. “From the outset there was little agreement in the convention center or in the streets, and the ensuing ‘Battle in Seattle’ did nothing to boost either prospects for trade or the city’s image,” the authors conclude.

The Port continued its determined effort to lure cargo away from Southern California ports by spending more than $500 million to double the size of its two largest container terminals, Terminal 5 in West Seattle, and Terminal 18 on Harbor Island. 

For the airport, the rapid expansion of air travel drove passenger volumes that exceeded all expectations. The airport terminal underwent major facelifts. In 1997, the Port embarked on what would be a decade-long battle to add a third runway at Sea-Tac, which would add flight capacity during poor weather. 

In 2008, after years of litigation with the cities around the airport and bruising battles in Olympia, the first Alaska Airlines plane touched down on the new runway.  Hundreds of homes had been purchased and bulldozed, streams re-routed, and wetlands created to make way for the project.  

The book fails to cover the politics and personalities of the Port leadership throughout that turbulent era. A succession of Port commissioners demonstrated remarkable stamina over the decades to complete billions of dollars in projects, despite tremendous political and financial challenges. The man who steered those projects, Mic Dinsmore, executive director from 1992 through 2006, is nowhere mentioned in the book. 

Dinsmore retired, but his legacy was clouded by subsequent audits and allegations of financial wrongdoing. No criminal charges were filed. The book recounts that Dinsmore’s successor, Tay Yoshitani, spent much of his energies working to restore the public’s trust by overhauling the Port purchasing and construction policies for more accountability and transparency. 

The book also credits Yoshitani with rebranding the Port’s disjointed environmental programs into a set of comprehensive policy commitments—the “Green Gateway.”  As a marketing tool, the Port could tout its environmental achievements to commercial customers and to a public increasingly aware of the industry’s impact on pollution and climate change. 

Environmental stewardship, Yoshitani recognized, was a “competitive edge for Seattle, complementing the Port’s mission to promote economic growth.”  Seattle and Tacoma ports have pledged to phase out seaport-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In 2014, changing economics and the evolution of the shipping industry led to the startling announcement that the Port of Seattle and its rival in Tacoma were creating a joint venture, the Northwest Seaport Alliance. The joint venture would manage maritime cargo operations in both harbors, to better compete with California and Canadian ports. 

“For decades, the idea that the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma would be anything other than committed rivals bordered on treason. Each port esteemed its independence,’’ the book recounts. Port Commissioner Stephanie Bowman likened the pact to “tearing down the Berlin Wall.”

Cargo went up after the alliance but sagged in the pandemic. The two ports still struggle to regain the cargo business lost since 2019. A decade later, tensions still exist between some commissioners and staff of the two ports.

Long-simmering tensions over commercial development near maritime facilities flared into a bitter battle in 2016 over a proposed sports arena in SODO near the Terminal 46 container terminal. The Port, long backed by waterfront labor and businesses, won a 5-4 City Council vote against the project – but development pressures around the Seahawks and Mariners stadiums continue today. 

The book describes the internal and external pressures to address racial disparities in employment and contracting led the Port to create an Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in 2019. Those efforts accelerated with the election of Sam Cho in 2020, followed in 2022 when Toshiko Hasegawa and Hamdi Mohamed defeated incumbents. For the first time, people of color held a majority on the Commission, and they drove increased spending on community programs and support for the Port’s immigrant workforces.

The 21^st Century has brought hard questions about some of the fundamental values of the Port – that more ships, planes, and passengers are good – and how the Port relates to its workforce and communities affected by its operations. 

Some environmental critics call for curtailing air travel and ending the Alaska cruise business, which has grown to 800,000 passengers this season. Sea-Tac will soon reach its capacity for more passengers, but the search for a new airport site has stalled.

Rising Tides and Tradewinds ends on a confident note. Challenges are nothing new, the authors write. “But the Port’s story is one of innovation, gumption, and progress – handrails through each global and local disruption.”

“Rising Tides and Tradewinds” was produced in 2024 by HistoryLink and Documentary Media and is distributed by University of Washington Press. The book is available in local bookstores and through University of Washington Press