Story originally posted at mynorthwest.com
It was 60 years ago today – Aug. 21, 1964 – when the Beatles made their first visit to Seattle.
In honor of the occasion, KIRO Newsradio decided to retrace the footsteps (and tire tracks) of the band – who had to make it from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) to the Edgewater Hotel and then to Seattle Center – all the while being mobbed by screaming fans.
Think of this story as something of a “Tragical History Tour.”
The Beatles came to Seattle for the first time 60 years ago and played a single show on a Friday night at what’s now Climate Pledge Arena. This is a familiar story that has been told many times on previous anniversaries. However, some YouTube footage posted by the Associated Press of showing the Beatles arriving at SeaTac and heading out of the airport in limousines poses some intriguing questions about how the band avoided fans and made their way to the city in an era that predates the I-5 freeway.
Looking back, it’s easy to assume that the band had to get past all the fans who knew the band was coming and who had packed the main terminal building and gathered on the east side of the field. But the old film doesn’t show that. Instead, it shows the band far away from any buildings, near what appears to be an old water tower, and then leaving the airport grounds in limousines through a gate in a chain-link fence and driving out into a residential neighborhood.
Analyzing The Beatles’ travels
For forensic and investigative help, KIRO Newsradio reached out to Perry Cooper, spokesperson for Sea-Tac (which he calls “SEA”) and a good friend of “Seattle’s Morning News.” Cooper examined the film as well as some stills and topographic maps and got some help from other airport staff to first figure out where the Beatles’ plane had come to a stop after landing.
“That far northwest end is where we determined where that tower was that we can see in the background photos,” Cooper said, pointing on his computer monitor to an image and describing a tall, narrow structure, painted in alternatingly white and dark colored bands for high visibility.
“And basically (the plane) is on the edge of what would be the runway,” Cooper explained. “And then you see this little cement space that goes off to the side? That would be the taxiway. So they would have parked it on that taxiway, it appears, and that’s on the very far north end of the airfield.”
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Cooper cautions that all of this part of the 1964 version of Sea-Tac has been radically changed – especially when the Port of Seattle expanded westward and built the third runway in the early part of this century.
By using those old topographic maps as well as some vintage aerial photos, Cooper found a match between a hill that used to be next to the airport, and the route the Beatles’ limousines likely took as they drove away from the chartered Lockheed Constellation which had brought the band from Las Vegas.
“Just to the north and to the west of that space would have been the edge of the airfield, and there would have been neighborhoods there,” Cooper said. “In the video, you can see from where the plane’s parked, they actually go up a hill with the police escort and the limousine. They’ve gone up a hill from where the aircraft was.”
And so how did they get from the airplane part of the airport – the runways and taxiways – to the surface roads and highways required to get the four mop-top lads to the Edgewater Hotel?
“They probably went to a chain link fence gate that was there, and then they entered into what looks a dead-end road for that neighborhood,” Cooper said. “And then somehow wheeled off through the neighborhoods to head north.”
That neighborhood that used to be along the old western boundary of Sea-Tac where the limousines and police escorts are seen emerging from the gate in the fence – let’s call it Beatlesville – no longer exists. And the roads aren’t there anymore, either. It’s now where the third runway stands; the water tower is gone, and so is the hill that Cooper spotted on the maps and in the footage.
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However, by taking the research of Cooper and his staff, and by closely examining a 1964 Enco map of Seattle picked up on eBay, it’s possible to identify and to get to what might be a few remaining blocks of the neighborhood road the Beatles took to get away from Sea-Tac on Aug. 21, 1964.
What was next: Going to the west side of Sea-Tac
The next step was to head over to the west side of Sea-Tac and see in person what might remain of that frenetic day 60 years ago.
KIRO Newsradio got help from Ron Foster, president of the club Mustangs Northwest. Foster was willing to lend his time and driving skills – as well as a beautiful car almost old enough to have been in existence when the Beatles first came to Seattle.
“We’re sitting in a 1965 Mustang convertible, and this is known as an ‘A code,’ which is a 289 [cubic inch displacement engine], four-barrel [carburetor], [and] automatic transmission,” Foster said, as he sat in the driver’s seat and prepared to take part in the suburban safari portion of the tour. “The color of the car is vintage burgundy, and a little side note, this was my wife’s car in high school.”
Foster was the perfect wheelman for the Tragical History Tour. He’s a Navy vet, a retired Alaska Airlines mechanic who worked at Sea-Tac for 20 years, and a guy who totally understood what KIRO Newsradio hoped to accomplish.
After meeting up in a parking lot in Burien along First Avenue South, Foster looked at Perry Cooper’s research, and then watched the video. After a few minutes spent examining the 1964 map, we zeroed in on South 176th Street – site of a defunct overpass over SR-509 – which Ron Foster quickly dubbed “Beatles Avenue.”
After a short drive, Foster guided the Mustang to the end of South 176th Street where a fence now stands at 10th Avenue South. The defunct overpass came years after the Beatles visit and it was made obsolete by construction of the third runway. But, the fact that South 176th Street rated having an overpass built for it when SR-509 was constructed seems like evidence that this was the main road into and out of the west side of the pre-third runway, Beatles-era Sea-Tac Airport.
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“If I was the driver for the Beatles,” Foster said, contemplating the landscape and surroundings of South 176th Street and gripping the wheel of the Mustang, “I would have taken this road.”
From “Beatles Avenue,” it was a fairly simple drive to go north and then west in order to connect with Highway 99. Since there was no I-5 freeway and no 509 freeway between Sea-Tac and Seattle in 1964, Highway 99 would have been the most likely route for the Fab Four’s motorcade.
On the south edge of downtown Seattle, improvisation is required to retrace the Beatles’ route – meaning exiting Highway 99 right before the tunnel and heading north along the viaduct-free waterfront. The Alaskan Way Viaduct was in place in 1964, and it’s a fair bet the limos took the viaduct northbound, and then used the exit ramp to Seneca, for what would then be a fairly simple drive to the Edgewater via northbound First Avenue and then westbound Wall Street, or, perhaps an even better bet was the Western Avenue exit from northbound 99 just south of the old Battery Street Tunnel.
Why it was not an intuitive drive
Without the viaduct, this portion of the Tragical History Tour meant Ron Foster had to do a lot of U-turns and turnarounds to get to the famous hotel where the band fished in Elliott Bay from their windows. The not-so-secret route that gets there the fastest is westbound on Wall Street.
On a mid-August morning, the Edgewater appeared to be doing brisk business welcoming tourists and other Seattle visitors. After a quick orbit through the main driveway, Ron guided the Mustang toward what was then called the Seattle Center Coliseum.
Again, with KIRO Newsradio giving directions from the passenger seat, it was not an intuitive drive from the Edgewater to Climate Pledge Arena, thanks to more of those seemingly only recently turned one-way streets and many “no left turns” signs. Then, after one turnaround on Denny Way facilitated by a short parade through the Space Needle’s circular driveway, the beautiful Mustang pulled up to the curb along Thomas Street at Warren Avenue North, where a service entrance to the old Coliseum once stood.
Six decades ago, the band had a much harder time getting around in Seattle, thanks to all those screaming fans camped out at the airport, the hotel and Seattle Center. But, they did manage to play their 29-minute set before 14,720 fans.
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Then, it was back to the Edgewater – this time, hiding in an ambulance, since fans had crushed the roof of the awaiting limousine. The next day, they likely retraced their route to Sea-Tac Airport, driving though Beatlesville on Beatles Avenue for the last few blocks before once again going through the service gate and down the hill to the Lockheed Constellation.
The four-engine propeller plane took off and headed north for a concert that night in Vancouver, British Columbia. But then, because somehow or other, the band and its entourage had neglected to properly clear U.S. Customs, the plane came back and landed at Sea-Tac again, so that the necessary paperwork could be properly processed before the group left the United States.
Thus, technically speaking, the Beatles landed in Seattle – or, at least, at Sea-Tac Airport – twice in August 1964.
Special thanks to Perry Cooper and Ron Foster for their assistance with the Tragical History Tour.
You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.
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