Rising Tides and Tailwinds: The Story of the Port of Seattle

A century ago, Seattle was held hostage by its own waterfront. Competing railroad companies built a chaotic sprawl of rail lines, docks, and warehouses along the shoreline of Elliott Bay, creating conditions so bad that visionary civic planner Virgil Bogue called the harbor side ＂a blot on the city and a menace to the lives of its people.＂ After years of bickering and lawsuits, the 1911 Port District Act was passed, making the Port of Seattle the first public port formed under legislation. The new public seaport briefly became the second busiest in the country during World War I. In the 1940s the Port of Seattle agreed to provide civilian air services by building Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, which today serves millions of passengers per year. This new edition covers the innovative Northwest Seaport Alliance, created in 2015 with the Port of Tacoma to jointly operate commercial shipping out of two harbors; the rise of cruise ship travel and the accompanying economic boom; Sea-Tac’s responses to 9/11 and the Covid-19 pandemic; and the airport’s growth and new International Arrivals Facility. Revised and updated, this new edition brings the story of the Port of Seattle up to the present and marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Seattle’s bustling international airport.

Casey McNerthney is a historian at HistoryLink and coauthor of four books, including Seattle at 150. Kit Oldham is a historian at HistoryLink and coauthor of Moving Washington Timeline. Peter Blecha is author of nine books, including Stomp and Shout; director of the Northwest Music Archives; and a historian and editor at HistoryLink. Oldham and Blecha are coauthors of the first edition of Rising Tides and Tailwinds.