Found this news story today, thought id share it with everyone. Mixed feelings about this myself, while its sad to see a place with so much history torn down, its good to see what there doing with the property. A place that built weapons of war, turning into a peaceful place of fields of grass and wetlands.
SEATTLE (AP) — The dilapidated factory that helped make Seattle a high-tech town is being demolished after 75 years, a casualty of time, technology and tails that grew too tall. Boeing Co.'s Plant 2, a sprawling but long outdated building between Boeing Field and south Seattle's Duwamish River, gave birth to some of the world's most significant aircraft. It was the site of Seattle's biggest disappearing act and a home to "Rosie the Riveter," women who built thousands of World War II planes.
It's also where the mostly unskilled workers of a fish-and-timber town first learned the art of assembling aluminum, engines and electronics into sophisticated flying machines.
As the danger of global conflict grew, Boeing opened the factory in 1936 to build the prototype for the B-17 Flying Fortress. Eventually, nearly 13,000 of the bombers would be built, half of them at Plant 2.
Later in the war, it was where Boeing developed the B-29, a revolutionary plane with advanced radios, radars and computer-aided machine guns, that dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"These were incredibly advanced pieces of engineering and they were being made by people who would spend those war years learning how to be essentially the high-tech workers of their day," says Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle's Museum of History and Industry. "So when we think about Seattle as a hotbed of high-tech innovation, it's not just from the recent years, it really can be traced very much to what happened in Plant 2."
Under an agreement with the state and federal governments and Indian tribes, Boeing will tear down the nearly empty factory to restore more than a half-mile of the Duwamish and create nearly 5 acres of wetlands. Demolition should begin this fall, Boeing spokeswoman Kathleen Spicer said.
Plant 2 is about a mile up upriver from Boeing's original Plant 1, a site sold decades ago.
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Mbailey
