SEATTLE — The dilapidated factory that helped make Seattle a high-tech city 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Boeing Co.’s Plant 2, a sprawling but long-outdated building between Boeing Field and south Seattle’s Duwamish River, gave birth to some of the world’s most significant aircraft.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 skill 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 atomic 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.
During World War II, Plant 2 was so crucial that Boeing camouflaged its roof with faux streets and houses of fabric and plywood, making it nearly vanish into nearby neighborhoods.
But the plant was headed toward obsolescence within 15 years after it opened. The roof beams were just 35 feet high, and the tail of the prototype B-52 was 48 feet tall. Boeing’s temporary fix was to put hinges on the early B-52s’ vertical fins, corporate historian Mike Lombardi said.
The plant is now overshadowed by Boeing’s nearby complexes for military work, research, offices, flight testing and aircraft deliveries.
