The Space Needle Namer:...OR WAS IT?

The Space Needle Corporation has kindly informed me, citing a recent book by Robert Spector, that Developer Edward Carlson named the Space Needle. But although he certainly gave approval for the name, the story given below is contradicted by a much older book, which contemporaneous to the construction of the Needle.

Here's the Carlson story from a 1999 Seattle PI article.

Eddie Carlson was in Stuttgart, Germany, in a four-star restaurant 400 feet up a television tower. It was 1959.

Carlson, the consummate hotel man, looked around him. It was a week night. The restaurant was packed. He looked out the window.

He was planning the Seattle world's fair. In his autobiography, ``Recollections of a Lucky Fellow," Carlson says that night in Stuttgart he became obsessed with the idea of a tower.

He sketched ``a clumsy slender tower " and put a ring around the top. Below it, he wrote: ``Space Needle."

The design would be changed many times. Not the name. ( My emphasis)

While everything else makes perfect sense, there's a problem with the idea that Carlson wrote the name on the original casual sketch. It's almost certainly not true!

The naming appears to have happened months later, at the Seattle architectual firm of John Graham, who along with Victor Steinbrueck, was one of the principle architects of the needle. But according to Mansfield, Steinbrueck, a gifted artist as well as the architect probably most responsible for the finalized form of the Needle, signed on well after the Needle obtained its famous double-saucer, tripod-tower concept and got its moniker; before, it was, as it were, yclept "Space Needle." (Read your Chaucer.)

After much searching, I ended up at the main Seattle Public Library and found my way to the Seattle archives - which had book about the Needle's design and construction, written in 1962 at the time of its construction: Space Needle, USA, by Harold Mansfield. (Rewritten in 1976 as the Space Needle Story.)

The book goes into some detail about the evolution of the design. Carlson was indeed the driving force and primary developer, as well as the man who came up with the idea of a large saucer-like restaurant at the top of a tower. But Mansfield describes specifically that the name "Space Needle" came as a result of a staff meeting at John Graham's architectural firm after a dramatic architectural painting showed the Space Cage, which it had been called up to that point, perched atop a single, pointed tower. (Likely the painting above- Mansfield refers to the painting that induced the term as dramatic, with orange and purple searchlights, and features a single rather than the eventual tripod tower. ) This is months after Carlson's initial napkin sketch.

Aggravatingly, it leaves out the actually namer: but we know the group - the original Space Needle design team at John Graham's firm, and again, I'm guessing that rules out the needle artist who made this painting and the man who drew the design stage it was based on, who would not have made the sudden kind of exclamatory christening on seeing their own work in the middle of a meeting.

Although Carlson deserves enormous credit for the Needle, he may not be responsible for coming up with the name, and almost certainly did not do so at the time of his napkin sketch. This version contradicts the 'lean-over the drawings" story I heard at the Space Needle that stated specifically that the name was brought to the board of directors as a result of architectural drawings, which would be just a story but it fits the Mansfield book. Mansfield's description of the design process resulting in the naming is detailed, and for some time at Graham's firm, it was called the "Space Cage." It also contradicts Eddie Carlson's own redrawing of his original sketch, which does not include the name "Space Needle" written underneath, as the Spector account suggests above.

There are more reasons to prefer the Mansfield account:

Mansfield clearly spoke with many of the principle designers and architects at the time of the Needle's construction rather than with Carlson many years later. His description of the design evolution is fairly thorough, though not rigorous. The Spector account is a simple anecdote. If Mansfield is correct, months of design work went by between Carlson's idea and the naming, so Carlson did not name it when he made the concept sketch.

The Reference Librarian at the Central Library pointed me to the collections of John Graham's and Victor Steinbrueck's papers at UW's Allen library. Next time I'm there, I'll check them out - there may be original notes that point to who it was who actually coined the term "Space Needle.

In the meantime, if anyone has access to a Lexus- Nexus search for Seattle Times or PI articles on John Graham's architectural firm during the Needle's design era, 1959-1962, it might be handy.

This trivia shall not fade.