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Introduction

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No Room of Her Own

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Oral History ((PSOH))

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Abstract

I arrived in Seattle from the East Coast in 1984, and within a few weeks, I stumbled on my first job—and my first home—in the Pacific Northwest. The shelter where I lived and worked during my first year in the city was in an old convent in the shadows of that space age spire, monument “to the era’s belief in commerce, technology and progress,” that makes its stock appearance in every movie and sitcom ever shot in the city.1 Built by private developers for the 1962 World’s Fair at the cost of $4.5 million, the Space Needle would be refurbished for another $20 million in 1999, the year that Mayor Paul Schell would make the mistake of inviting the World Trade Organization to town.2 The year that the first U.S. astronaut orbited the earth, the first visitors to the Space Needle, accompanied by “female elevator attendants dressed in skin-tight gold ‘spacesuits,’” made their way to the top of the structure to dine in the “Eye of the Needle,” a restaurant that every fifty-eight minutes makes a full revolution above the city.3

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Notes

  1. Mildred Tanner Andrews, ed., Pioneer Square, Seattle’s Oldest Neighborhood (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005), 21.

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© 2011 Desiree Hellegers

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Hellegers, D. (2011). Introduction. In: No Room of Her Own. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339200_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339200_1

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-230-11658-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-33920-0

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