UW exhibits recall when the first World's Fair came to town

You may not have noticed it, but there's quite a bit of time travel going on in Seattle this summer, all centered on the University of Washington campus.

Across campus, placards identify where long-vanished buildings of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific (A-Y-P) Exposition of 1909 once stood. In Suzzallo Library, you can look over the shoulder of Cora Watt as, in 1909, she writes to her friend Miss Merlin Davenport of Breckenridge, Texas: "Have you forgotten me — way up here in Was.? You should come up to the fair in Seattle."

At the Burke Museum and the nearby Museum of History & Industry, too, you can see A-Y-P keepsakes and view dozens of photographs of it. Pore over this memorabilia long enough and you'll feel you're living in Seattle of 100 years ago, when the A-Y-P was the talk of the town.

Here's one way to tackle all the material on display:

"The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: When the World Came to Campus"

The Suzzallo Library Exhibit Room makes an excellent starting point for learning what the A-Y-P Exposition was all about. Here you'll find a useful timeline that gives some historical context for the fair. You'll also find politicians' speeches in typescript, organizers' correspondence and daily fairground programs. Attendance and cash-flow statistics show how big a deal the A-Y-P was. It lasted 138 days, boasted 3,740,551 paid admissions and took in $1,096,475, closing with a $62,676 surplus.

The fair's utopian spirit is evident in the first line of railroad magnate James J. Hill's opening-day address: "The idea of a federation of the world comes nearest realization in the great expositions that assemble actual evidences of man's progress in self-development and towards his development of the earth."

For those with a limited tolerance for lofty sentiments, there was always the Pay Streak, a circuslike midway lined with exhibits, some of them "instructional." That included a notorious Igorrote Village display in which a mountain tribe from the Philippines, clad in not much more than loincloths, went about their daily business. The Streets of Cairo and the Klondyke Dance Hall also came under fire for supposed indecency.

Less scandalous but more mystifying were Prince Albert, "The Educated Horse" (what did he actually do?), and something called "Girls from Mars" ("Unfortunately no images of this last attraction seem to have survived").

The Suzzallo exhibit offers sneak peeks into the legwork and politicking that led up to the fair. Different display cases highlight the various buildings promoting countries, states, territories, counties, cities and assorted products and industries.

Of the latter, the Forestry Building — with 124 massive logs supporting a roof and two cupolas — was the most spectacular, while Hoo-Hoo House — representing the International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a lumbermen's association — was the most drolly named. (Until 1959, Hoo-Hoo House was the old UW faculty club.)

On the lower level of Allen Library South, a showcase devoted to "Women's Work at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Exposition" makes clear the A-Y-P was a crucial gathering place for suffragettes. Result: Women won the right to vote in Washington state in 1910, a full decade before they did so nationally.

"Photographing the Fair: The A-Y-P-E Photos of Frank H. Nowell and Others"

If Suzzallo whets your appetite for the A-Y-P experience, the Museum of History & Industry's grand display of A-Y-P photographs should satisfy it. These are modern prints, most of them made from the original glass-plate negatives of official A-Y-P photographer Frank H. Nowell. The images are big and sharp in detail. Perusing them is like entering a bright, surreal dream superimposed on the now-sedate grounds of the UW campus.

Nowell took close to 5,000 black-and-white photographs of the fair, sometimes from the rooftops of exposition buildings, sometimes from high elevations in the middle of thoroughfares. "Nowell had ... an extremely tall tripod," contemporary Seattle photographer John Stamets quips, "and the courage to use it."

Highlights include a shot of the A-Y-P grounds at night, luminous with electric lights powered by a generator at Snoqualmie Falls, and one of a pyramid-shaped "Temple of Palmistry" sited next to a "Baby Incubator Cafe." (The incubators, touted as a great medical advance, held real, live prematurely born infants: "not dolls but ... genuine mites of humanity.") The most striking image may be of a Shawmut automobile display, with an Igorrote tribesman inspecting it closely while a nervous showroom attendant looks on.

For pure magic, however, Nowell's image of the Cascades — a man-made waterfall along what is now the upper part of Rainier Vista — is the winner. Why did they ever get rid of it?

Be sure to take time to leaf through the exhibit's scrapbooks of newspaper articles on the A-Y-P, covering everything from panic over a supposed invasion of white-slave traders ("One hundred procurers, men whose work it is to supply houses of ill repute with inmates, left California on May 15 for Seattle ... ") to items on Ka-lang-ad, the "Roaming Igorrote" whose curiosity about his surroundings made him "a nuisance of a dozen or so kinds — all of them profane." (Could that be Ka-lang-ad looking at the Shawmut?)

The feather in this exhibit's cap is an excellent display of postcards, many of them colorized versions of Nowell's images.

"A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply"

This exhibition at the Burke goes beyond the strictly archival, noting the cruel, sometimes unconscious injustice of the A-Y-P's portrayal of indigenous peoples — and inviting contemporary Native American artists to respond to it.

The A-Y-P's use of Chief Seattle's image seems particularly galling. In one souvenir photo album, a cutline describes him as a strong but "unprogressive" character who "lived to see the great turning point and effacement of his race."

Fortunately, he didn't live long enough to read that. Skun-doo, a Tlingit chief, wasn't so lucky. He endured the irony of being imprisoned for three years on McNeil Island for practicing shamanism, only to wind up at the A-Y-P re-enacting shamanic rituals for entertainment purposes.

Seattle's appropriation of the totem pole dates to this period, too, and resulted in some near-comical cultural confusion. "Nuu-chah-nulth carvers from Vancouver Island, living in Seattle," the curators tell us, "were called Bella Bella, a mainland B.C. group, and had been commissioned to carve models based on photographs of Tlingit (Alaska) poles." The five poles in question, in Ravenna Park, were a recommended stop on A-Y-P visitors' itineraries.

Seattle's Japanese and Chinese communities, organizing their exhibits themselves, fared better than most ethnic groups. It was, the curators say, "the first time many visitors saw East Asian culture in a positive light."

The Burke's juried show of new work by Native American artists includes masks and carvings that pay straightforward tribute to traditional craftsmanship, along with biting political statements in a variety of experimental media.

Nicholas Galanin's video installation, "Who We Are," delights in being an appropriation of an appropriation as it flashes through images of all the Native American holdings in the Burke's collection at lightning speed.

Glass artist Preston Singletary engages in appropriation of another kind in "Tlingit Storage Chest," taking some of his ancestors' traditional Tlingit design and sandblasting it in bas-relief on a ruddy glass coffer. The Museum of Glass in Tacoma has a Singletary retrospective on display through Sept. 19, 2010. This one piece alone suggests it would be worth a trip.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com