The Boeing Bust and the Billboard

Boeing's Seattle workforce peaked at around one hundred thousand employees in nineteen sixty-seven, in the middle of the Vietnam War era contracts and the commercial aviation boom that had made the seven thirty-seven and seven forty-seven programs simultaneously possible. Then the contracts ended, the war wound down, the airlines stopped ordering planes, and the company began cutting. Between nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-one, Boeing eliminated sixty-two thousand jobs in the Seattle metropolitan area. The local unemployment rate reached thirteen percent. Home values collapsed. The population of King County declined for the first time since the nineteen thirties.

Real estate agents Bob McDonald and Jim Youngren, working for Henry Broderick, Incorporated, put up a billboard near Sea-Tac Airport in nineteen seventy-one. The text read: "Will the last person leaving Seattle, turn out the lights." The billboard's tone, somewhere between dark joke and genuine despair, captured the mood of a city that had organized its entire economic identity around a single employer and was living through the consequences. The original billboard was eventually torn down, but it became one of the most reproduced images in Seattle's civic memory. It appears on bumper stickers and bar walls to this day.

The long-term consequence of the Boeing Bust was a deliberate policy decision: Seattle would not let this happen again. Through the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, city and state economic development offices courted technology companies with a persistence and a tax incentive structure designed to create an alternative industrial base. When a company called Amazon signed its first Seattle lease in nineteen ninety-four, it was filling a vacancy in the economic strategy that the nineteen seventy-one billboard had created. Boeing is still here. It still employs tens of thousands of people in the region. The lesson the city drew from the bust was not to leave Boeing but to not be only Boeing.