Pike Place Market, Fish Stall, 1950s

Public Health sanitary inspectors were responsible for monitoring the quality of the wide variety of products that were for sale at the Pike Place Market. This photograph shows an inspector examining items at a fish stand. A meat counter is also visible in the background.

The Public Health Sanitation Division was responsible for monitoring the quality of food products and their handling by those workers who sold or manufactured food products. Public Health's duties included the physical inspection of dairy farms and the milk distribution process, as well as the monitoring of markets, restaurants, and other establishments that prepared and/or sold food and beverages.

Public Health also was responsible for issuing operating permits to places that served or manufactured food products. The 1931 Annual Report listed the following types of establishments as being under Public Health's purview: Restaurants, lunch counters, beer parlors, bakeries, candy kitchens, food factories, canneries, oyster packers, and drug store fountains. In the early years of restaurant inspection, Public Health kept statistics on the ethnicity of the restaurants' owners.

The 1939-43 Public Health Annual Report noted that an "influx of so many people" working in the war-related industries into Seattle had seriously taxed the resources of the Public Health inspection team. By the mid-1940s, Public Health, which was routinely finding the results of its bacteriological test surveys of glasses and dishes in restaurants to be consistently unsatisfactory, pressed ahead with work on the adoption of a Standard Food Ordinance that contained less ambiguous definitions of proper sterilization procedures.

Restaurant Inspection, possibly Lowell's, 1950s