public domain- Seattle Neighborhoods: Seattle Center — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
The Seattle Center, located north of downtown at the foot of Queen Anne Hill, is a cultural and entertainment campus built in 1962 for the Seattle World’s Fair. The World’s Fair helped to transform Seattle from a rather provincial backwater into a genuinely cosmopolitan port city, and it created a lasting legacy of important civic buildings for the arts, professional sports, and major community events, such as the annual Bumbershoot arts festival that takes place over Labor Day weekend.