Overview
Festival ’71
Bumbershoot began not as “Bumbershoot,” but as Festival ’71, a three-day gathering at Seattle Center that would lay the foundation for what became one of the country’s longest-running arts festivals.
Seattle historian Paul Dorpat writes of that first event:
“More than 125,000 people — roughly one Bellevue plus one Walla Walla — gathered at the Seattle Center on August 13–15, 1971, for Festival ’71… [with] little more promotion than a cardboard poster screened in yellow and magenta… announcing ambitiously, ‘Fun for Everyone.’”
— Paul Dorpat, Bumbershoot’s Formative Years (1971–1979), HistoryLink.org
The festival was inspired by then-Mayor Wes Uhlman, who returned from a mayors’ conference in New York energized by the idea of a city-wide arts celebration. Seattle was in the midst of the Boeing Depression and facing economic uncertainty. The goal, as Dorpat recounts, was to “keep the human spirit going.”
What emerged in August 1971 was expansive, unpredictable, and defiantly “people-oriented.” Nearly the entire Seattle Center campus was activated for the first time since the 1962 World’s Fair. The programming was wide-ranging: experimental art installations, laser light shows, folk and rock performances, crafts, dance, theater, logging demonstrations, motorcycle races, and even a Hot Pants contest.
Dorpat describes it as:
“a populist grab-bag… a smorgasbord of experiences… a multimedia extravaganza.”
It wasn’t yet called Bumbershoot. But the spirit was there.
By 1973, the festival adopted the name “Bumbershoot”, an old slang term for umbrella, and the identity began to take shape. What started as a bold civic experiment during a difficult economic moment grew into a defining Labor Day weekend tradition for Seattle.
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Source & Credit
Portions of this history are quoted and adapted from:
Paul Dorpat, “Bumbershoot’s Formative Years (1971–1979),” HistoryLink.org Essay 10027, posted September 1, 1999.
Available at: https://www.historylink.org/File/10027
