Space Needle

The Space Needle: What Seattle Built for Its 1962 World’s Fair

The Space Needle is 184 metres tall (605 feet), weighs 9,550 tons, and was built in 13 months for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition World’s Fair. The design was sketched on a napkin by Edward Carlson, the exposition’s chairman, who wanted something that looked like a flying saucer with a tower. The architect John Graham Jr. made it structurally feasible. It opened in April 1962 and Seattle has been defending it against people who think it’s tacky ever since.

It’s not tacky. It’s a mid-century optimist’s vision of the future, and standing beneath it and looking up still does something to your sense of what public architecture can attempt.

The Observation Deck

The top deck sits at 158 metres. Tickets cost around $40 for adults and include the Loupe, a glass floor panel on the observation level that lets you look straight down 158 metres to the plaza. Some people photograph it. Some people step over it. A few people lie down on it. The admission also includes re-entry for the same day, which lets you go up twice: once for the daytime view and once for the illuminated city at night. The nighttime view of the Seattle skyline, Puget Sound, and on clear nights Mount Rainier is genuinely excellent.

Book online. Summer weekends see queues of 45 minutes or more without pre-purchased tickets. The Space Needle website sells timed entry and the difference between booking and queuing is about an hour of your time.

The Loupe kitchen on the top level is a rotating restaurant that completes one revolution every 47 minutes. The food is Pacific Northwest-influenced and priced at levels appropriate to 158 metres of elevation. If you want to eat at the top, a dinner booking includes the observation deck access; this works out cheaper than paying observation deck admission and then also paying for dinner, so it’s worth calculating.

The Seattle Center

The Space Needle sits in the Seattle Center, the 74-acre park left over from the World’s Fair. The surrounding buildings have all had post-fair lives. The Museum of Pop Culture (formerly called the Experience Music Project and EMP Museum, still MoPOP in local shorthand) is in a Frank Gehry building that looks like a deconstructed guitar body. The permanent collection covers Jimi Hendrix (Seattle-born), science fiction, horror, and popular music history, all in a genuinely well-curated way. It is a much better museum than it gets credit for and the Hendrix gallery alone is worth an hour.

The Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibition, in a purpose-built pavilion adjacent to the Space Needle, contains the largest single permanent collection of Dale Chihuly’s work. Chihuly is the glass artist known for his extravagant, biomorphic installations; he was born in Tacoma, 50 kilometres south. The main Glasshouse structure, where a suspended glass sculpture fills the entire ceiling above a garden, is extraordinary. Combined Space Needle and Chihuly tickets are available and save money on separate admissions.

Kerry Park and the View Problem

One honest note on the Space Needle observation deck: the best view of the Space Needle is not from the Space Needle. Kerry Park, on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill about a 20-minute walk from the Seattle Center, has a viewpoint that encompasses the Space Needle with the downtown skyline behind it and Mount Rainier (on clear days) behind that. This is the photograph you’ve seen of Seattle. It costs nothing and is consistently stunning at sunset. Go to Kerry Park, photograph the needle from below, then decide whether you also want to go up.

Getting Around Seattle

The Seattle Center is served by the Monorail from Westlake Center downtown (running since 1962, another World’s Fair artifact, $2.25 each way, takes 2 minutes). The monorail is worth riding precisely because it’s a remnant of 1962 optimism about urban transit, not because it goes anywhere you’d otherwise struggle to reach.

The Link Light Rail connects the airport (Sea-Tac) to downtown in 38 minutes and now extends to the University District and Bellevue. Renting a car is useful for day trips outside the city but not necessary for the Space Needle and downtown area specifically.

What Else to See

Pike Place Market, about 2 kilometres south of the Seattle Center on foot, is the original farmers’ market (opened 1907). The fish throwers at Pike Place Fish Market are real and have been throwing fish to order since the 1980s. The market stalls sell flowers, produce, and prepared food at prices that reflect actual supply chains rather than tourist markups. Rachel, the brass pig near the main entrance, is the donation collection box. The lower levels of the market contain an eccentric collection of small shops that have been there for decades.

Pioneer Square, the original city centre, has the best architecture in Seattle: late 19th-century brick buildings on a Romanesque Revival grid. The Underground Tour visits the streets that were buried when the city was raised after the 1889 Great Seattle Fire. It’s legitimately interesting and has been running since 1965.