The end of the 19th century brought hard times to Italy: peasant farmers paid high taxes; industrialization was almost non-existent; eight years of military service were compulsory. Small wonder that over four million Italians picked up and left, most of them immigrating to the United States. One of them was Giuseppe Desimone, a strapping lad: over six feet tall, over 300 lbs, who arrived from the Naples area in 1898. When he reached Seattle he bought some land south of town and became one of the truck farmers selling his produce directly to householders in Seattle.
In 1907, there was a new farmers market at the end of Pike Place in addition to the wholesale market at the foot of Columbia St. Though the real estate wasn't worth much, farmers rented them from the landlord, Frank Goodwin, whose family had designed and put up the buildings. Eventually, Joe Desimone became a landlord himself, buying up one stall, then another, until he literally owned the entire Market.
In the mid-1930s, he heard rumors that Bill Boeing wanted to move his airplane manufacturing company (founded 20 years earlier) to a city with a suitable airport. It's worth noting that Boeing was started as a Flying Boat business, and the "airports" it used were basically waterfront: on the Duwamish and on Lake Washington, first at Madison Park, later at Renton. Desimone made Boeing an offer he couldn't refuse: a big chunk of his farmland--a 28-acre tract we know today as Boeing Field--in exchange for one dollar and the promise not to move the company.
Desimone died in 1946, but his family retained ownership of the Market until the 1970s, when it was taken over by a public agency, the Pike Place Market Preservation & Development Authority. For its part, Boeing kept its headquarters at the new airport until 2001, when it decamped for Chicago.
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