This talk in brief: the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition dominated local activities in the summer of 1909. It is said to have put Seattle on the national map and thrust the city into a period of economic growth and stability. That may be true, but there is no doubt that the A-Y-P celebrated the brief period of phenomenal growth following the 1897 discovery of gold in the Yukon when Seattle's population exploded. Although touted as being forward looking where earlier expositions were not, architecturally speaking, the primary buildings of the A-Y-P borrowed the vocabulary of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the Renaissance Revival taste favored by its Eastern designers. This talk scrutinizes local perceptions of the A-Y-P and the fairs impact on social, political, aesthetic and economic matters in Seattle and Washington State in 1909 and in the years that followed. It concludes that the A-Y-P did not change any important outcomes in the post-fair period.

In this talk, I examine from a number of perspectives how the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opened the city of Seattle and its people to the world and how it also created an awareness of Seattle, Washington state and the Pacific Northwest on national and international scenes. In fairness, I should rephrase my subject,

Students of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition have paid considerable attention to the Eskimo and Igorotte villages or the Baby Incubators as examples of attractions that repeated at multiple expositions across the country between 1893 and World War I. The regular presence of the Olmsted family of landscape architects has also been a highlight of world fair histories.

Frank G. Nowell, the official photographer and sometimes official fotografer of the A-Y-P owed his post to J. E. Chilberg, the exposition's president who apparently met Nowell in Nome on one of his trips to Alaska.