NORTHWEST BASEBALL

Everett, WA

Our trip takes us further north to Everett, Washington, home of the largest building in the world, the Boeing manufacturing facility. We visit their museum, have lunch in nearby Mukilteo, and take in the history of native tribes in the area at the Hibulb Cultural Center in Tulalip.

Boeing Future of Flight

Boeing is an iconic Seattle company, like Microsoft, Amazon, or Starbucks. William E. Boeing founded the Pacific Aero Products Co. there in 1916 and applied his own name to the endeavor the following year. It is now the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value, with $66.61 billion in revenue in 2022 from selling airplanes, helicopters, missiles, rockets, satellites, and more.

Although the company's headquarters are now in Arlington County, Virginia, it continues to build planes out of its massive production facility in Everett. The Boeing Everett Factory includes the largest building in the world by volume (472,370,319 cubic feet) and covers 98.7 acres. It was built in 1967 for the Boeing 747 and has been expanded to accommodate newer, larger models over the years. Today, the Everett factory employs about 30,000 people.

The company typically offers tours of the facilities but had not done so since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We stopped instead at the Boeing Future of Flight Museum, located on the other side of an airstrip used to test new builds.

The museum covers the history and technology of flight through a collection of interesting exhibits. The highlight for me was the Destiny Module, a full-scale copy of the primary research lab for U.S. payloads sent to the International Space Station (ISS) since 2001. We also caught the Backstage Pass theater presentation, showing how the production line works and including a question-and-answer session with staff.

We took the elevator up to the Sky Deck for a look at some of the production buildings on the other side of the thickening layer of damp air. For today, we had to imagine the rest.

 

Ivar's Mukilteo

Just southwest of Everett is Mukilteo, on the edge of Possession Sound as it connects to Puget Sound. We thought it would be appropriate to stop at Lighthouse Park in Mukilteo for lunch at Ivar's, a Seattle chain that stretches as far as Spokane. The crab sandwich and crab bisque hit the spot, and the view worked as well.
 

Downtown Everett

Our plan had been to go next to downtown Everett to visit the Schack Art Center, which was founded in 1974 and offers free art exhibits, classes, and workshops. It also boasts having the “only public glassblowing hot shop north of Seattle.” But the gallery was undergoing a major renovation for a new set of exhibits. So we continued north, stopping briefly for a look at “Someday,” an appropriately aviation-themed statue designed and fabricated by Dillon Works of Mukilteo.

 

Hibulb Cultural Center

We drove north over the Snohomish River and several other waterways to the Tulalip Indian Reservation, home of the Hibulb Cultural Center. The museum celebrates the history and culture of the Tulalip Tribes, a collection of seven tribes in the mid-Puget Sound region.

The museum’s beautiful and impressive collection includes the original copy of the Treaty of Point Elliott, which created four Native American reservations in the Northwest in exchange for millions of acres of land, making way for a wave of new American settlers and changing indigenous lives in the area forever.