1960 - 1969

Timeline

1960
The Port has various discussions throughout the year about activating Jetty Island (known back then as “Tract Q”) for public access and recreational use. Ideas for access include installing a cable, a walkway and a suspension bridge. The Port considers industrial uses on the jetty as well. For the time being, the City of Everett’s Park Board is allocated a portion of the jetty, including a beach, to be used for picnicking and water activities during the summer of 1961.

1961
The Heavy Machinery division of Western Gear Corporation moves into the old Everett Pacific Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company site (now part of Naval Station Everett). The company develops the 94.5-foot-diameter, doughnut-shaped turntable (as well as gears and a motor) to power the rotating restaurant (then called Eye of the Needle, now SkyCity Restaurant) in Seattle’s Space Needle, built for the 1962 World's Fair.

1962
The Super Mill Company (formerly Super Shingle) plant closes, bringing to an end 70 years of 14th Street shingle mills.

1962
The World’s Fair in Seattle spurs regional excitement and promotion. Nearly 10 million people attend the fair.

1963
One hundred citizens show up at a Port meeting, many to voice objections to a Seattle company’s proposal to create a garbage dump on Jetty Island. Some of the local community expresses to the Port that it already very much enjoys using the jetty as a bathing beach rather than as an industrial property, as is part of the Port’s long-term plan. Seattle’s garbage never came to the jetty.

1963
Four thousand Volkswagens are imported through the Port.

1963-1966
The prolific boat-building Morris brothers cease constructing boats for the Bryant Company of Seattle and go on to create new companies, one of which is the marina supplies and equipment shop Boatland USA, housed in their old boatmaking building.

1965
A local Kiwanis Club builds a sun shelter on the jetty and tries launching a ferry to and from the island. That idea has to be abandoned when too much sediment clogs the route.

1965
The Port of Everett dedicates a new, 950-slip modern marina at the old 14th Street Dock basin south of the filled property; the marina (now the Central Docks) is built for both commercial and pleasure boats. (The old marina, between piers 1 and 2, is eventually removed and filled to create Hewitt Terminal.)

1967
In June, local dentist Eldon Schalka leads an effort to rescue the Equator from a breakwater along Jetty Island. The boat had been connected with the poet and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).

1967
It’s a rough year for mills: fires claim the old Jamison Lumber and Shingle Company and the shuttered Pilchuck and Lumber Company. Columbia Veneer shuts down after just a few years of operation, and Summit Mill Company (formerly C-B Lumber and Shingle Company) moves its plant to Darrington, Washington.

1967
The Boeing Company opens its Everett assembly plant to build its 747 jumbo jet. The vast complex is the largest airplane manufacturing facility in the world.

1968
The Alumina Dome is built along the south bayfront near Pier 1; the rounded structure is a key addition for the Port as a site to import and store bauxite — also called alumina — which is used to make aluminum, a vital material for the aerospace industry as well as for household goods.

1968
The Everett Yacht Club builds an expansive new two-story waterfront clubhouse with views of the Snohomish River and Port Gardner Bay. The site — at the current Yacht Basin, still the Yacht Club’s location today — includes a guest moorage dock, a stage, a cocktail bar and a dining room with a sunken dance floor, plus a second-floor meeting room (dubbed the Black Prince), which includes a bar and a kitchen. The old clubhouse is demolished.

1968
Cruise-A-Home, maker of luxury pleasure cabin cruisers, establishes itself on the Port’s bayfront. The company offers two main boat styles — dubbed “Corsair” and “Crusader” — which are marketed in British Columbia, southeast Alaska and the West Coast of the United States.  

1968
The Port offers a “summer recreation ferry service to the Jetty” and its “saltwater park” and later notes a “…generally favorable public response for [the] Jetty Recreation program… [from] July 20 through August 11 a total of 2,287 persons had been carried to Jetty.” The Port also approves a resolution to partner with Washington State Parks to create a Jetty Park (now referred to as Jetty Landing).

1968-1969
A national economic crisis hits the Puget Sound region hard when airlines cut back on orders for all aircraft, including those for Boeing’s new 747 jumbo jet, slowing production. At the Everett plant, the number of employees drops from 25,000 to less than 7,000. (By 1973 however, the dollar had stabilized, the economy had begun to improve, and Boeing orders went up, bringing relief to the region.)

1969
In February, Boeing tests its 747 jumbo jet — christened City of Everett — with a maiden flight taking off and landing at Paine Field.

 

Moving From the Smokestacks Age to the Jet Age

The 1960s reshaped Everett from solely a midcentury lumber, fishing and pleasure boating community to one that added a new dimension — jet city. In 1967 The Boeing Company set up shop for its 747 jumbo jet by building a massive aircraft manufacturing plant in south Everett. By 1968, the Port’s huge storage dome at the south bayfront became a daily visible reminder of this change; the dome was built to house alumina, a prime ingredient of aluminum — which in turn was a key component in making airplanes.

Boeing’s arrival coincided with a decline, however, in the region’s wood-products industries as the decade saw the lumber and shingle industry say goodbye to the Port’s bayfront. When the Super Mill Company plant closed in 1962, it ended some 70 years of shingle mills at 14th Street. Summit Mill Company moved its plant to Darrington, Washington, and fires finished off the Jamison plant and the closed Pilchuck Shake and Lumber Company. Everett — and along with it, the Port — quickly shifted to being largely dependent on the aircraft
industry, as well as other types of cargo, such as cars.

The Port kept moving forward, taking down the shuttered Super Mill plant and developing the 14th Street small boat basin into an expansive, modern marina, dubbed at the time as the Everett Yacht Basin. The site offered around 950 slips for commercial and pleasure craft — and it was nearly 100 percent occupied by 1966. The old boat basin between Piers 1 and 2 was phased out and filled in, and the Everett Yacht Club moved north — it built a new clubhouse in 1968 — to the general site of what had once been the end of the  14th Street Dock. The Yacht Basin (today the site of Central Docks) included an expanded and improved section for the fishing fleet, too, and the Everett Fish Company expanded in 1964. Boating and fishing were in cruise mode.

Throughout the 1960s the local community and the Port continued to work together to create space on Jetty Island for public access and recreational use and got creative with ideas on how people could reach the island — which at the time the Port still called “Tract Q” — a site which locals had become quite attached to.