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 (and in some places nine) 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, 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. Still, Bogue continued to win allies among populists, progressives, the labor movement, and even some of the railroads (though not the Great Northern). 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 (a tunnel through Downtown; a uniform alignment of piers) 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. especially given the impending 1914 completion of the
Panama Canal. 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, A viaduct to Pike Place Market "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,
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 (especially) 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 (2023) 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 (see following section
Politics and the Port) 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 (Todd Pacific) 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 (now part of Terminal 46), 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 (part of which now constitutes
Coast Guard Station Seattle, the rest of which is part of Terminal 46). 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. Piers 43, 45, 46, and 47 were eventually incorporated into present-day Terminal 46. 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.
The Fifties By 1952, it was clear that Seattle's maritime sector had not made a post-war recovery commensurate with other U.S. ports. Many companies were wary of doing business in Seattle in the wake of the 1948 strike with projects such as expanding the grain terminal at South Hanford Street, building the massive
Shilshole Bay Marina in
Ballard, purchasing the Ames Terminal (which became Terminal 5) in
West Seattle on the West Waterway of the Duwamish, and purchasing Pier 28 from the
Milwaukee Road, which filled in a gap in Port-owned land on the mainland side of the East Waterway and paved the way for modernization of that portion of the waterfront. By 1956, foreign commerce shipping tonnage had recovered to levels not seen since the 1920s. A 1959
KIRO-TV documentary
Lost Cargo put the matter squarely before the public,
Containerization ferry near Terminal 46 taking on grain at Pier 86 Grain Terminal The 1960
Mechanization and Modernization Agreement (M&M) put the ports and labor unions of the West Coast of North America, including Seattle, firmly on the path away from
break-bulk cargo toward
containerization.
Alaska Steamship Company had experimented with containerization as early as 1949, and
Sea-Land had begun the move toward international standardization when it shared its patents in 1956, In the summer of 1962, with the world's eyes on Seattle as host of the
Century 21 Exposition (a World's Fair), the Port announced a US$30 million plan to build a major new container port on the Duwamish Waterway. The Port ended up buying the
Boeing Plant 1 site along the Duwamish, which was developed into another modern container facility, Terminal 115, as was the old grain elevator site at South Hanford Street.
Continued growth Naturally, advantages were not always on Seattle's side. For example, Totem Ocean Trailer Express (now
TOTE Group), founded in 1975, opted to base its shipments to Alaska out of Tacoma, where land was cheaper and room for expansion less likely to be an issue. 1975 also was the end of many decades of weekly
United Brands banana-boat arrivals in Seattle: since then, bananas have arrived in Seattle by rail or truck. And for cargoes coming
into the U.S. from East Asia, Seattle, in the relatively sparsely populated
Pacific Northwest, would always have a disadvantage in competing with the
Port of Long Beach and
of Los Angeles in populous
Southern California. But, in general, the Port continued to expand. The TOTE loss spurred the Port to acquire and stockpile more land along the Duwamish. The Port further expanded in the 1980s, with the growth of the China trade and the Port's increased capacity for
intermodal transport, with containers transferring between ships and trucks, but especially between ships and rail. Although some carriers shifted operations from Seattle to Tacoma,) had fallen into dereliction. The Port took a leading role in trying to remedy this, with Pat Davis and Paige Miller, the first two women on the Port Commission, taking a particularly large role. and in 1993 moved into it as their new headquarters. (Pier 69 is also the Seattle terminal for
Clipper Navigation's Victoria Clipper hydrofoil service. That pier includes extensive public space, including (as had been briefly the case in the 1910s) a rooftop park.
Into the 21st Century cruise ship
Rhapsody of the Seas at Smith Cove Cruise Terminal, Pier 91. Pier 86 Grain Terminal in foreground. The privately owned
Elliott Bay Marina in background. The Bell Street Pier Cruise Terminal opened in 2000, bringing heavy cruise ships to Seattle for the first time in decades, with Seattle as home port for ships from
Norwegian Cruise Line and
Royal Caribbean International. A second portion of the terminal opened the following year, and by 2003
Holland America Line and
Princess Cruises were running cruises to Alaska from a temporary cruise berths at Terminal 30. It was estimated in 2011 that each home port ship call puts US$2 million into the Seattle economy. However, there are significant adverse environmental effects. These have been somewhat, though not entirely, mitigated by a ban on discharge of untreated sewage by cruise ships, and by an arrangement with
Seattle City Light to provide shore power to the ships so that they do not need to run their engines while in port. The Smith Cove Cruise Terminal opened at Pier 91 in 2009, providing Holland America Line and Princess Cruises with a more permanent Seattle facility; Terminal 30 reverted to use as a container terminal as a part of an expanded Terminal 28. In the wake of the
September 11 attacks, security became a major priority. Besides the well-known measures at airports, there was also a major increase in seaport security, though it remains the case that the vast majority of containers ship without their contents ever being inspected. Soon after the start of his tenure, major scandals broke about the Port. It came out that there had been a significant problem with racist and pornographic emails among the Port of Seattle police, and the Port Commissioners declared that a prior investigation had been "poorly conducted on all levels." After hiring a new chief of the port police, the organization began to regain its footing, only to be thrust in the spotlight again when former CEO Mic Dinsmore claimed that a sizable severance had been authorized by the commission. The organization refused to pay and the claim was dropped, though the situation led to an attempted recall of one commissioner. In December that year, the State Auditor's Office issued a report critical of the Port's contracting practices (particularly those related to construction of the third runway). The audit report sparked an investigation by the
Department of Justice, but the investigation was closed without action. Newly elected commissioners and CEO Yoshitani implemented a series of reforms, including increased commission oversight of port construction projects and consolidation of the organization's procurement activities into one division to afford better control. Yoshitani also increased commitment to environmental practices. The port has many environmental programs, including shore power for cruise ships and a plan to clean up the Lower Duwamish Waterway (in partnership with Boeing, King County, and the City of Seattle). The Ports of Seattle and Tacoma have been able to turn certain environmental concerns to their advantage, as a 2009 study that the Port commissioned from Herbert Engineering showed a significantly lower
carbon footprint for shipping from Asia through Puget Sound and then by rail to the Midwest than for shipping to other West Coast ports or through the Panama Canal. a strategic plan for the port's next 25 years. That same year, the Port became one of the most vocal opponents of the
proposal to build a new arena in the Stadium District, which they said would cause issues for its operations. The City of Seattle studied the port's concerns at length and found them to be lacking in factual data or extensive studies. and the East Waterway of the Duwamish, seen from the
Space Needle, 2014.
Harbor Island at right. Container port facilities in the right half of the photo are all on Port of Seattle land.
Alliance with Tacoma The possibility of merging the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma was seriously entertained as early as the 1980s, when Sea-Land abandoned Seattle for Tacoma, followed by
K Line and
Evergreen Marine Corporation. While Tacoma was clearly the winner in these particular transactions, both port systems were aware that they were being played off against one another. On October 7, 2014, the Port of Seattle and
Port of Tacoma announced an agreement to "jointly market and operate the marine terminals of both ports as a single entity," though they were not merging. Joint operations began with the formation of the
Northwest Seaport Alliance on August 4, 2015, creating the third-largest cargo gateway in the United States; by the end of the year, it reported more than 3.5 million
twenty-foot equivalent units handled by the two ports, an increase of 4 percent. == Politics and the Port ==