SEATTLE — Everything connects. The first commercial aircraft made by Boeing, in 1919, hangs from the ceiling. It has no wheels because it regularly landed on Lake Union here after airmail runs to Canada. You can see that lake through a hole in the floor of this building, a former Naval Reserve Armory that was built out over the water in 1942. And above that hole now rises a commissioned 65-foot-high sculpture made by John Grade from the planks of a century-old schooner that also plied Lake Union.

That sculpture reshapes the ship’s worn beams into a mammoth pillar that pushes through the roof like one of the Pacific Northwest’s great cedars — or, perhaps, like a pockmarked, barnacled pile that might have once supported the piers of this city’s port.

There is something elaborately playful about the sense of place evoked in the atrium of the new Museum of History & Industry, which opens here on Saturday. The plane, the sculpture, the allusions: it is difficult to imagine the same objects on display elsewhere having the same effect. The museum is inseparable from its location, and in that sense it is a typical “local” museum. In one sense, too, this is just a new building for the museum of the Historical Society of Seattle and King County, which used to be found in a less traveled neighborhood.

But Mohai, as the museum calls itself, did not just relocate. It is a $90 million transformation of its earlier version. (LMN Architects worked on the landmark armory.) And while it is still a local museum — it has a collection of some four million objects, is supported by private donations and now features some 50,000 square feet of exhibits that chronicle, dissect, criticize and honor Seattle’s past and future — it is also following in the footsteps of other American state and city historical societies that have reinvented themselves in recent decades.