Space Needle

At 605 ft (184 m) high the Space Needle was once the tallest structure west of the Mississippi River. The tower is 138 ft (42 m) wide, weighs 9,550 short tons (8,660 metric tons), and is built to withstand winds of up to 200 mph (320 km/h) and earthquakes of up to 9.0 magnitude, as strong as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake.


Elevators take visitors to an observation deck 520 ft (160 m) above ground in 41 seconds, which offers panoramic views of the downtown Seattle skyline, the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Elliott Bay, and various islands in Puget Sound. On April 19, 1999, the city's Landmarks Preservation Board designated the tower a historic landmark.

Jumping incidents[edit]

Six parachutists have leaped from the tower since its opening, in a sport known as BASE jumping. This activity is legal only with prior authorization. Four of them were part of an authorized promotion in 1996, and one of the jumpers broke a bone in her back while attempting the stunt.^[51] The other two jumped illegally and were arrested.^[52]


Paul D. Baker was the first person to jump from the Space Needle, committing suicide on March 4, 1974.^[53] Mary Lucille Wolf also jumped from the tower that year, on May 25.^[53] Following the two 1974 suicides, netting beneath and improved fencing around the observation deck were installed.^[54] In spite of the barrier additions, however, another suicide by Dixie Reeder occurred on July 5, 1978.^[55]

Appearances in TV and film[edit]

As a symbol of the Pacific Northwest, the Space Needle has made numerous appearances in films, TV shows, and other works of fiction. The Space Needle is often used in establishing shots as an economical means of indicating the setting is Seattle. Examples include the TV shows Frasier, Grey's Anatomy, Dark Angel, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and films It Happened at the World's Fair (1962) and The Parallax View (1974) where it was used as a filming location, and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Chronicle (2012).^[56] In the 1999 film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me made an absurdist visual gag conflating another icon of Seattle, Starbucks, with the tower, showing the coffee chains's name written across the Space Needle's saucer placing the villain Doctor Evil's base of operations there after his henchman Number 2 shifted the organization's resources toward the coffee company.^[57][58][59] As a visual symbol of Seattle, the Space Needle has been incorporated into the logos of NBA (Seattle Supersonics logo used from 1995 to 2001) WNBA, MLS, and NHL professional sports teams.^[60][61]


The Space Needle has been involved in practical jokes, especially those on April Fools' Day. In 1989, KING-TV's Almost Live! reported that the Space Needle had collapsed, causing panicked people to call emergency services and forcing the station to apologize afterwards;^[62] the incident was compared to the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which caused panic among some listeners.^[63][64] In 2015, public radio station KPLU 88.5 FM reported in the news story "Proposed Development To 'Assimilate' Seattle's Landmark Space Needle?" that a permit application (Notice of Proposed Land Use Action) had been submitted "to construct a 666 unit cube to assimilate" the landmark.^[65]


Other TV appearances include The History Channel's Life After People, in which the tower collapses after 200 years because of corrosion.^[66] The tower was also destroyed in the TV miniseries 10.5 when a 7.9 earthquake hits Seattle.^[67] The miniseries mistakenly portrays the Needle as crumbling concrete, though the structure is actually made of steel and designed to withstand up to a 9.0 earthquake. The Space Needle was also the site of the first task for the finale of The Amazing Race 35, where contestants had to walk atop its roof.^[68]