When Seattle’s first commercial airport opened in 1928, Georgetown had been a vibrant community for more than half a century. “We were here before the airport was.
They forget that,” says Rosario-Maria Medina, a community activist in the South Seattle neighborhood of Georgetown, just north of bustling Boeing Field.
We’re sitting in the house that once belonged to her grandfather Ismael Barron, who moved from Texas to Georgetown in 1959. Barron joined his brother Manuel, who’d arrived in the 1940s and, like Manuel, set up a barbershop in what was becoming one of Seattle’s most diverse areas.
Georgetown and adjoining South Park had significant numbers of Latino, African American, Asian and Pacific Island residents, while the Seattle metropolitan area remained overwhelmingly white.
The roar of airplanes punctuates our conversation. To Medina, the sonic interruptions are a persistent reminder of how decades of development practices allowed the airport, industrial facilities and freeways to encroach on the community. By the time her grandfather arrived, the local library and movie theater had closed, and the completion of Interstate 5 in 1962 killed much of Georgetown’s remaining business activity. “They knew these areas were mostly immigrants and refugees, so they knew they could do what they wanted,” says Medina.
