Museum of History & Industry

The "Changes" section of MOHAI's True Northwest exhibit

MOHAI's core exhibit rings most of the building's second floor and provides a chronological history of Seattle and its environs. The exhibit winds through a series of 22 different sections that each focus on a distinct event or era in Seattle history ranging from pre-Pioneer settlements up to the modern day. MOHAI Creative Director Ann Farrington, who previously worked on Seattle's Experience Music Project and the National Holocaust Museum, has said that it is, "not a timeline, but a series of stories strung like pearls" in order to reveal how Seattle's past, present, and future are interconnected.[5] Along with numerous artifacts and photographs, the exhibit incorporates a significant amount of interactive media that allow visitors to touch screens or play games that explore different parts of Seattle history and culture. The core exhibit also includes the Great Fire Theatre, a "Gilbert and Sullivan-style opera" that involves artifacts from the 1889 Great Seattle Fire singing the story of the event over a film of historic images, and the Joshua Green Foundation Theater which plays a 7-minute film about Seattle culture on two large screens.[6]

The Boeing B-1 on display in the museum's Grand Atrium, with the Rainier Brewing Company logo sign behind.

The first floor of the museum is an expansive open room named the Faye G. Allen Grand Atrium. Both the original floor and ceiling of the Naval Reserve Building are visible from the Grand Atrium. Hanging in the center of the space is the 1919 Boeing B-1, the first commercial plane built by Bill Boeing. The plane is displayed to illustrate a typical flight path onto Lake Union, where the plane took off and landed during its tenure. On the south end of the Grand Atrium is a three story tall grid filled with Seattle cultural icons, including the neon Rainier "R" sign, a clam costume from Seattle seafood chain Ivar's, and a stuffed cougar donated by Eddie Bauer, founder of the namesake clothing store. The north end of the Grand Atrium features a 64-foot tall sculpture called Wawona by local artist John Grade. Wood and other materials for the sculpture were salvaged from the 1897 schooner Wawona, which was dismantled in 2009 due to a lack of funding for restoration.

The Walker Gallery is MOHAI's main space for displaying temporary and traveling exhibits. It takes up the entire southern side of the museum's second floor. When the museum initially opened at Lake Union Park, the Walker Gallery showcased an exhibit about Seattle's relationship with film called Celluloid Seattle: A City at the Movies. In 2015, the Walker Gallery hosted American Spirits: The Rise & Fall of Prohibition travelling from the National Constitution Center.

Another temporary gallery that occupies the third floor space of the museum. Much smaller than the Walker Gallery, the space is designed "to promote community ownership and stewardship of MOHAI" by showcasing collaborative projects with community partners.[7] The first exhibit in the gallery was a partnership with leading Seattle arts group Arts Corps, that worked with Seattle high school students to produce poetry and spoken word related to photos from MOHAI's historic photographic collection.

A young visitor looks through the WWII-era TANG periscope in MOHAI's Maritime Gallery

On the top floor of the museum is a small gallery dedicated to Seattle's maritime history. The space was originally designed as a replica of a ship's bridge in order to train naval recruits during World War II and features a set of south facing windows overlooking Lake Union. One of the most popular artifacts in the gallery is a working World War II-era TANG periscope from a naval submarine which offers a 360-degree view of Lake Union and downtown Seattle. The gallery is curated by the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society which has maintained a close partnership with MOHAI since the early 1950s.

The museum opened a major museum addition on October 11, 2013 called the Bezos Center for Innovation. The project is funded by a $10 million gift from Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.[8] The project was designed by Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects and occupies a portion of the museum's Grand Atrium.[9]

The most heavily used portion of MOHAI's holdings is the collection of approximately 3.75 million historic photographs, which is the largest aggregation of historic documentary photography in the region. Like the rest of MOHAI's collections, the photos are primarily focused on Seattle and King County, but includes strong coverage of other parts of Washington State as well as Alaska. One of the most extensive sets of photos is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection. Seattle's (now defunct) original newspaper donated an estimated 2 million photographs to MOHAI in three successive gifts from 1975 to 2012. The collection comprises both published and unpublished news photos taken throughout Western Washington from 1917 to 2009. Another major group of photos is the PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection. Operating under the motto, "Anything. Anytime. Anywhere." Webster & Stevens was a major commercial photography studio that set up shop in Seattle in 1903. They had a range of important clients, most notably the Seattle Times, which used the studio for nearly all of its newspaper photographs for 23 years until it hired staff photographers. In 1983 PEMCO Insurance made a $50,000 gift to MOHAI, allowing it to purchase roughly 55,000 photos by Webster & Stevens, creating the PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection. Other noteworthy MOHAI photograph collections include: The Milkie Studio Collection; The King County News Photo Collection; The Seattle Historical Society Collection; Alaska Bureau Photograph Albums; Anders Beer Wilse Photographs 1892-1913; Ferdinand Brady Photographic Postcards circa 1907-1920; Frederick and Nelson Records 1901-1991; H.W. McCurdy Collection on the Puget Sound Bridge & Dredging Co. 1900-1945; Lockheed Shipbuilding and Construction Company Photographs; Moran Brothers Company Collection 1893-1939; Josef Scaylea Collection; Cary Tolman Collection; Robert H. Miller Collection; Washington Dayshoot Collection.

One hundred years' worth of city directories from Seattle and other King County cities are stored at MOHAI's Sophie Frye Bass Library.

Most of MOHAI's archival holdings—including manuscripts, photographs, maps, books, motion pictures, and printed ephemera—are housed in the museum's library. The library is named after Sophie Frye Bass (1866–1947), granddaughter of pioneers Arthur and Mary Denny, and author of two books on early life in early Seattle including Pig Tail Days in Old Seattle (Pub. 1937). Bass was a prolific collector of historical books and manuscripts, and in 1914 donated her entire library to MOHAI's predecessor, the Seattle Historical Society. The library also houses the collections of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society and the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. The library, located in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood, is open to the public by appointment.