The Pike Place Fish Market, owned since 1965 by John Yokoyama, is has become a tourist attraction for the way its staff sings and throws fish. Over time, the company has come to live up to the “world famous” claim of its logo.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, fishing was one of Seattle’s primary enterprises alongside logging and mining. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, most commercial fishing operations had moved north to British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. Within the first decades of the twentieth century, the population of salmon, so essential to the Pacific Northwest economically and symbolically, was already in major decline in Seattle’s surrounding waterways. The dredging of the Duwamish Waterway, the diversion of Lake Washington, pollution from mills, shipyards, and sewers, and the increase in commercial fishing all contributed to the drop in salmon populations.[1]

Indigenous people had been involved in commercial fishing in Puget Sound since the 1830s, when the Hudson’s Bay Company diversified their operations in the Northwest to include logging, farming, and fishing as well as the fur trade. Later, under treaties such as the Point Elliott Treaty, American Indians around Seattle reserved the right to fish, hunt, and harvest in their ancestral lands. Duwamish and Snoqualmie people continued to fish commercially as well as subsistence for years until they were gradually excluded from valuable fishing grounds. Fishing rights continue to be a major point of friction between the City of Seattle and local Native people.[2]

In keeping with Seattle’s history of fishing, the Pike Place Fish Market has committed itself to selling only sustainable seafood. The company works with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program to raise consumer awareness of the ecological impacts of fishing and to promote sources of seafood that have been fished or farmed to minimize environmental impact.[3]

Credits and Sources:

Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.

Klingle, Matthew. Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation. “About Us.” Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. Accessed August 13, 2016. http://www.seafoodwatch.org/about-us.

Pike Place Fish Market. “We Care about Sustainable Seafood.” Pike Place Fish Market. Accessed August 13, 2016. https://www.pikeplacefish.com/about/sustainable-seafood/.