This record is made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons license.
The Seafair Festival began in 1950. Seattle's previous summer festival, Potlatch, ran intermittently from 1911 to 1914 and from 1934 until 1941. Festival organizers were interested in reviving the tradition and hired Walter Van Camp, director of St. Paul's Winter Carnival, to create a new maritime-themed summer festival for the city. Seafair featured many events including parades, music, waterskiing and hydroplane competitions, and other festivities. In addition to the main events, neighborhood activities and parades were also held throughout the city in areas such as Lake City, the Central District (home to the East Madison-East Union Mardi Gras Parade) and the International District (home to the Bon Odori festival). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Aqua Theatre on Green Lake also hosted music and comedy events as well as swim and high dive performances by the Aqua Follies. In the festival's first year, the downtown parade alone drew crowds of 150,000. In 2022, the festival celebrated its 73rd year with events reaching an estimated two million people.
The collection includes materials related to Seafair events from the 1950s to 2020 including programs, brochures, stickers, pins, postcards, and magazines. These materials cover topics including general Seafair celebrations, Aqua Follies performances at the Aqua Theatre on Green Lake, the Bon Odori festival in the International District, the Gold Cup regatta on Lake Washington, parades and the Seafair pirates.
Materials are arranged alphabetically by subject. General materials including brochures, programs and magazines discussing Seafair events at a broad level are at the front of the collection. The remaining subjects focus on materials documenting more specific topics and events.
Certain publications within this collection have additional issues available in the Seattle Room:
This collection was brought together by library staff from existing materials in vertical files as well as additional donations and purchases accumulated over time.
The library continues to add materials to this collection on a regular basis.
We may decide to use or retain harmful language in our description when the terms have been used by the creator(s) of the materials to describe themselves or their community; when we have reused description created by the donor; when we have transcribed information directly from the materials; and when using national standards such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, which allow for standardized searching and retrieval of records. When including language from the original material in our finding aids or descriptions, we will indicate that this material comes directly from the original item by putting the language in quotes or prefacing it with a note that says the description is transcribed from the item or provided by the creator.
We will continually review our finding aids to identify harmful language and encourage you to contact us at specialcollections@spl.org if you find language that causes concern.
Collection is open and available for use.
Copyright restrictions apply.
[ITEM DESCRIPTION], Seattle Room Seafair ephemera collection. Seattle Public Library, Seattle, WA.