In 1964 the Seattle city government, in cooperation with a consortium of downtown business leaders, proposed the redevelopment and “urban renewal” of Pike Place Market. However, many Seattle residents feared that redevelopment would destroy not only the historic buildings but also the atmosphere of the market. They banded together and founded the Friends of the Market to oppose redevelopment plans. The Friends’ most public leader was Victor Steinbrueck, a local architect and professor at the University of Washington. The Friends and the city exchanged proposals and counterproposals through the late 1960s, but could not agree on acceptable plans. In 1971, the Friends collected signatures to put an initiative to declare Pike Place Market a historic district on the November ballot. The initiative passed, protecting the market from demolition and creating a nonprofit public agency to manage it.

This image shows Victor Steinbrueck at a press conference in March 1969, stating the Friends’ opposition to the most recent proposal. Steinbrueck is pointing to a map of Pike Place Market which illustrates how much would be demolished and that the small remaining market would be dwarfed by high-rise buildings. The conference was held in a building that itself would have been destroyed by the redevelopment.

Caption information source: “Market Wars: Inside the Campaign to Save Pike Place Market (Part 1),” by Joyce Brewster, HistoryLink, retrieved from: https://www.historylink.org/File/22664
Caption information source: “Market Friends hit renewal plan,” by Susan Hutchison, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 6, 1969, page 10.