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WORLD'S FAIR 1962 SEATTLE,

WASHINGTON,

U.S.A.

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IT IS SPECTACULAR, exciting, appealing. It is unique both in American and world architecture. The Space Needle, vertical symbol of the Seattle World's Fair and a permanent landmark on the Seattle skyline, is something everyone must experience.

Through history, great international exhibitions have given rise to great innovations in architecture : the Crystal Palace of London in 1851, the 60acre Vienna Fair building of 1873, the "gingerbread" of the 1876 Philadelphia Fair, the trendsetting Spanish-Moorish architecture of San Diego in 1915, more recently, the modern structures of the Chicago and New York Fairs; most famous of all, the Eiffel Tower of Paris, theme of the Fourth French International of 1889.

Like the Eiffel Tower, Seattle Space Needle is an eye-catcher, with a personality all its own. But it is most unlike the Eiffel Tower — or any other — both in concept and in the dramatic character of its view.

You haven't seen Seattle and the magnificence of its water-and-mountain surroundings until you've seen them from the Space Needle. You haven't dined until you've dined in the 360-degree revolving Eye of the Needle. You haven't strolled until you've strolled the Needle's breath-taking promenade. You haven't been in an elevator until you've taken the "space capsules" to the top of the Needle,

The multi-disk tophouse and the graceful tower structure, hidden from view from the high encircling windows, are the imaginative design of John Graham and Company, architects. Basic support of the tophouse is a rock-steady triangular core of heavy steel lacework, inside which are two 832step stairways. Three pairs of triangular steelcolumn legs converge to form a narrow waist 370 feet up the core and then, in sweeping curve, divide

CUT-AWAY VIEW OF TOP HOUSE 1. Aircraft Warning Beacon; 2. Natural Gas Torch; 3. Gas Burner; 4.

Fresh Air Supply; 5. Elevator Machine Room; 6. Heating and Ventilating Equipment; 7. Air Conditioning; 8. Enclosed Observation Level; 9. Tinted Glass; 10. Observation Deck; 11. Dishwashing and Food Preparation; 12.

Sun Louvers; 13. Tinted Glass; 14. Dining; 15. Turntable; 16. Turntable Tracks; 17. Kitchen; 18. Elevator No. 1; 19. Two Stairways to Ground Level; 20. Core Structure; 21. Main Columns; 22. Gift Shop; 23. Office; 24.

Elevator No. 2; 25. Foyer; 26. Cocktail Lounge; 27. Turntable.

into six arms reaching upward to hold the 500foot-high restaurant ring.

The tower is an artist's painting in full color.

Legs are "astronaut white"; the core is "orbital olive"; the tophouse undersurf ace is "galaxy gold," broken by a "sunburst" of white radial vanes extending to points against the sky. Above these are the outward-sloping restaurant windows, shaded by a "halo" ring in "reentry red," which extends from 'the promenade deck. Above this, a pagodalike roof in orange-tinted "galaxy gold" encloses mechanical equipment and elevator attic.

With a mezzanine floor between restaurant and observation deck, housing food storage, restroom and office areas, the tophouse becomes a five-story building in picturesque form. Surmounting it all is a 50-foot stainless steel beacon tower reaching to 600 feet, piercing the sky each fifteen minutes at night with chemically-treated gas flames of red, then gold, then green.

There are 3700 tons of high-test steel in the tower and tophouse structure, designed with double the strength required by the Seattle building code for earthquake resistance and half again the code requirement for wind. The highest recorded Seattle wind of 67 miles per hour will flex the tower less than an inch.

When you're standing in the canopied waiting area at the base of the tower you'll be standing over 5850 tons of buried concrete and steel which anchor the Needle in place. Planted there by the general contractors, Howard S. Wright Contractors, Inc., this constituted the largest continuous building concrete pour in the West. The great weight puts the center of gravity of the structure just below ground level, for downright positive stability.

Security plus architectural daring are the design ingredients of the extraordinary Space Needle.

HAVE YOU EVER PAINTED YOURSELF INTO A CORNER? How WOUM) YOU raise the steel, in great 40-ton pieces, for the •ill 600-foot Space Needle? An outHI side crane would require a tower as high as the Needle itself.

Widely-spreading guy cables would be impractical.

Paul Collop, the erection superintendent of Pacific Car and Foundry Company, steelwork contractor for the Needle, decided a huge derrick crane would have to sit in the core of the Needle itself and go up with it.

Step by step, the derrick lifted the pieces to be built around itself, then climbed with its own cable power out the top again, ready to raise another section.

The steel stairway up the middle of the core was being built up behind it. Finally the Needle was done and the 42-ton derrick was sitting on top of it.

Had Paul Collop "painted himself into a corner?"

Not this old timer. Laboriously, with the help of his "raising gang" of crack ironworkers, he lowered the crane in one vertically-stacked piece, down the top 60 feet of core to where the stairs ended. Then he opened a temporary hole in the steel core to let it out. Down long cables it llli! slid to the ground, and the public cheered.

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SPACE CAPSULES I N O T I S ELEVATOR C O M P A N Y ' S gold-colored capsule-shaped elevators, you'll be whisked up the outside of the Space Needle core to the tophouse at 800 feet per minute.

There a r e three elevators, each with a capacity of 30 persons. One is assigned to t h e r e s t a u r a n t level, one to the observation deck and the t h i r d serves as a combination service and e x t r a passenger elevator.

Accelerating quickly to full speed, you'll watch through viewing ports as the ground drops away, cars and people recede to toy size. You'll pass the big concrete platform m a r k i n g the 100-foot level, then a smaller one at 200 feet where carillon stentors r i n g out the sky melodies of the Seattle World's Fair.

F r o m the 300 to 400-foot levels you'll be in the Needle's n a r r o w " w a i s t " of closely compacted massive steel members, then you'll watch the graceful upper steel a r m s extended as y o u r capsule enters the tophouse. The t r i p has taken you j u s t 43 seconds.

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THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE FROM YOUR FAST "space capsule" lift, you'll step out on the 500-foot level into the fabulous "Eye of the Needle" restaurant, for a dining pleasure unequalled in America. A hostess in gold lame will direct you to a table or the cocktail lounge in the richly carpeted, congenially-decorated revolving circular area.

Almost imperceptibly, with floating smoothness, the ring-shaped restaurant floor will be turning in a clockwise direction at precisely the speed of the minute hand of a clock. You'll be moving along invisible steel tracks with wheels and bearings beneath the floor so well balanced that only a onehorsepower motor is required for the turning. The window wall outside the tables remains stationary, as does the central service and cooking area around which you circle, unfolding the view as you dine.

Want to make a telephone call? You can use a

"princess" phone at your table — but, look, it has no wires! The instrument radios to a pickup ring just under the windows and your call goes through.

You're concerned about finding your table again if you leave the moving circle ? They have thought of that. Each quarter section has its own predominant color. The waitresses, too — exotic in their tapered Capri pants and jackets of gold and cinnamon and rust — have to keep track of where you are. They have a system. Position clocks at the kitchen exits keep time with the restaurant ring.

Concessions

THE PROMENADE

Colorfully uniformed Space attendants direct visitors as they arrive at the "top". Information-wiSE, they are eager to help.

A SOUVENIR YOU MUST

The full, e x c i t i n g story of the building of Seattle's unique Space Needle from conception to completion, loaded w i t h breathtaking photography and bound in a colorful hard cover for a lasting keepsake.

Ask for

SPACE NEEDLE, USA $150 (Convenient m a i l i n g envelopes a v a i l a b l e )

HAVE!

You MUST VISIT the observation deck at the 518foot level. You'll find souvenir shops and a snack bar in the center of the glass-enclosed pavilion, with automatic vending machines that can cook and assemble a fresh hamburger in 15 seconds, brew fresh coffee, make their own ice for ice-cold beverages, make change for a dollar bill.

But step outside to the perimeter promenade, where there are telescopes mounted for scanning.

You'll never forget the view.

If you're facing south, 14,408-foot Mt. Rainier, highest mountain in the Pacific Northwest, is huge and magnificent before you. Below is the sweeping S-curve of the Monorail, leading to downtown Fifth Avenue. The buildings and towers of the Seattle business center are stretched out in the foreground.

The two large hill-top structures to the left are the King County Hospital on First Hill and beyond it, the U.S. Marine Hospital on Beacon Hill.

Your eye can follow the Alaskan Way viaduct, flanking the waterfront of Elliott Bay, at the south extremity of which is industrial Harbor Island.

Needle Facts HEIGHTS AND

WEIGHTS

The overall height of the Space Needle is 600 feet. The weight of the steel structure is 3700 tons. Beneath the ground, 30-feet below, are 2800 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, 560<ftons of it, plus 250 tons of reinforcing steel.

The restaurant," Eye of the Needle," is at the 500-foot level.

The Promenade deck of the observation level is 518.75 feet.

The gas-lit beacon tower rises 50 feet above the control house. Weight of revolving restaurant area, with guests, is 90 tons.

MATERIALS

Across the water and to your right is West Seattle, on hill Number 3 of the seven hills of Seattle.

Now you are looking west, past Navy piers to Magnolia Bluff, residential hill Number 4. In the Sound before you is Bainbridge Island. Beyond is a 50-mile backdrop of snow-topped Olympic Range.

To the northward now, nearby Queen Anne Hill humps in the immediate foreground. Behind it is the sixth of Seattle's high points, Phinney Ridge, at the crest of which is Woodland Park. In the distance, 10,750-foot Mt. Baker is a white sentinel against the sky.

Just to your right is Lake Union, Seattle's inland ship haven, connected by canal and locks to Puget Sound and by canal to Lake Washington, partly visible to the northeast.

Now you are looking east, toward Capitol Hill, the seventh of the city's main hills, topped by Volunteer Park, Beyond the city and its expanding suburbs east of Lake Washington, past Snohomish and Puyallup Valleys to left and right, your eye can trace a 140-mile crest of the Cascade Range which rims the horizon from Mt. Baker to towering Mt. Rainier.

You'll be reluctant to leave, but there are others who want to come and see. For them as for you, the Space Needle will be a tonic. It's the top treat of a favored land.

The Needle is constructed of a new, superior-strength steel identified as A-36. The top-house is coated with cement. The motor to turn the revolving restaurant has 1 horsepower.

CONSTRUCTION Conception to completion: lJ^OO days Needle $4,000,000.

Cost of Space

TRANSPORTATION Elevators speed to the top at 800 feet per minute. Time to Tophouse: U3 seconds. Each of the three elevators carries 29 persons, combined they will transport 1J+00 persons per hour. As a conversation piece, there are 832 stairs in each of two stairways.

EYE O F T H E N E E D L E

RESTAURANT

Makes one complete revolution each hour. Floor is 1U feet wide. Diameter is 66V2 feet. W E know the circumference, YOU multiply the diameter times Pi. Serves 250 persons.

COLOR

SCHEME

The legs are painted "astronaut white," the core, "orbital olive," and the Tophouse combines '"reentry red" and "galaxy gold."

ARCHITECTS AND ENGINEERS: JOHN GRAHAM AND COMPANY STRUCTURAL CONSULTANT: JOHN K. MINASIAN

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GENERAL CON-

TRACTORS: HOWARD S. WRIGHT CONSTRUCTORS, INC.

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FABRI-

CATION AND ERECTION: PACIFIC CAR AND FOUNDRY COMPANY •

ELEVATORS: OTIS ELEVATOR COMPANY •

GEAR COMPANY •

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TURNTABLE: WESTERN

STEEL: UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION

RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT: WESTERN HOTELS, INC.

Photo credits: Cover, back cover, center spread, page 12, Yang Color Photography — Page 4, Cut-away drawing, John Graham & Co. — Page 5, Pacific Car and Foundry Company — Page 6, 13, 14, George Gulacsik — Page 11, Western Hotels, Inc. Designed and lithographed by THE CRAFTSMAN PRESS, INC., SEATTLE 1, WASHINGTON, U.S.A.