On Memorial Day next year, Folklife will officially kick-off a summer-long Centennial celebration. Held almost exactly 100 years from the opening of the original A-Y-P, it will feature performances, films, ephemera and more.

Beginning this October, Seattle's Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) will launch a community-wide research project, Discovering A-Y-P, to explore our region's cultural identity through the history of the fair.

“Seattle and Alaska are economically bound at the hip, and no one in Seattle seems to know it,” says Dave Gering, head of Seattle’s Manufacturing Industrial Council (MIC). Indeed, in 2004, MIC’s Seattle Industry magazine documented $4 billion in Alaska trade passing through the Puget Sound region in a single year.