All are invited to the Free Pike Place Market celebration! Saturday, Oct. 23 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pike Place Market
Pike Place Market, Friends of the Market and Pike Place Market Foundation is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the passage of Initiative 1 on Nov. 2, 1971, which saved the market from extensive demolition and renovation. Friends of the Market, founded in 1964, led the fight to save the market!
Here is some background: Fifty Years ago, there was a successful populist revolt in Seattle!
There is a lesson for progressives to learn from the past successful effort to save the Pike Place Market from being torn down.
Seattle’s initiative 1 in 1971 to save the Pike Place Farmers Market from a redevelopment plan that would have replaced 90 percent of the Market with offices, hotels, and a parking garage. The initiative collected 25,000 signatures in just three weeks. And this was done without any paid signature gatherer; it was accomplished with volunteers!
The initiative passed with 59% of the votes cast. Despite the city council having voted unanimously for the redevelopment plan, both daily newspapers endorsing the plan, and the federal government offering millions of dollars in urban renewal funds to tear down the old buildings.
This was a populist revolt against an elitist attitude of modernizing Seattle that ignored the city’s heritage. Yet, at its core, the initiative could be considered a conservative movement to improve the present conditions that allowed open access to everyone rather than to tear down the open forum of the Pike Place Market and replace it with a soulless market that would constrain public access.
Should progressives consider that populists will support change when it preserves a democratic condition that doesn’t threaten to tear it apart.
Pike Place Market celebration!
See you in the Pike Place Market under the Clock
in front of Rachel the Pig!
Saturday, Oct. 23 10am to 4pm