Rainier Vista: The UW View Built for the 1909 World's Fair

The long view of Mount Rainier across the University of Washington campus is a leftover from a world's fair. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was held on the campus from June 1 to October 16, 1909, and Rainier Vista was one of the views its grounds were organized around. HistoryLink calls it the defining element of the University campus. [1]

In October 1906 the exposition company hired landscape architect John C. Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers firm of Brookline, Massachusetts. The family firms had already designed the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and Portland's 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, and Olmsted had drawn a citywide parks plan for Seattle in 1903 and a campus plan in 1904. The fair leased the southern part of campus, cut-over land grown thick with second-growth trees and dense underbrush. Olmsted wrote to his wife that the brake ferns were higher than his head and that the salal 'rattles like starched linen when one walks through it.' [1]

When he arrived, the campus lay some distance from the developed parts of Seattle. The Brooklyn neighborhood, as the University District was then known, had one streetcar line, and only one road, over the Latona Bridge where the Interstate 5 bridge is today, connected it with downtown. [1]

His plan was unlike other world's fairs. It relied on the natural scenery for its focal points. Using a concept called 'borrowed landscape,' Olmsted laid out vistas toward Lake Union, Lake Washington and Mount Rainier, and those axes organized the grounds. The largest circle, the Court of Honor, surrounded the Cascades and the Geyser Basin, and beyond them lay the Rainier Vista. The views, Olmsted wrote, 'will be vividly remembered by most visitors when the best efforts of architects and landscape gardeners have been forgotten.' [1]

Building it took force. Olmsted had $350,000 to clear about 200 acres, grade the slopes and plant the grounds. Crews used dynamite and teams of horses pulling plows, and the hardpan was so tough that a blacksmith was kept on hand to sharpen the blades. His colleague James Frederick Dawson supervised the work and directed the planting of more than two million trees, shrubs and flowering plants. To fill the geranium beds, officials named November 14, 1908, 'Geranium Day,' and every donated plant got its bearer into the grounds free. [1]

Of the three views, the mountain's is the one that lasted. The lake vistas are now hidden by buildings and trees, but Rainier Vista remains one of the most recognizable parts of the campus. The Geyser Basin survives as Drumheller Fountain, and the lower part of Stevens Way follows the fair's Pacific Avenue. [1]