In Depth

By East Coast standards, Seattle got a late start in U.S. history. Although explorers visited the region as early as the late 1700s, the first settlers didn't arrive until 1851. Capt. George Vancouver of the British Royal Navy -- who lent his name to both Vancouver, British Columbia, and Vancouver, Washington -- had explored Puget Sound as early as 1792. However, there wasn't much to attract anyone permanently to this remote region. Unlike Oregon to the south, Washington had little rich farmland, only acres and acres of forest. It was this seemingly endless supply of wood that finally enticed the first settlers.

The region's first settlement was on Alki Point, in the area now known as West Seattle. Because this location was exposed to storms, within a few years the settlers moved across Elliott Bay to a more protected spot, the present downtown Seattle. The new location for the village was a tiny island surrounded by mud flats. Although some early settlers wanted to name the town New York -- even then, Seattle had grand aspirations -- the name Seattle was chosen as a tribute to Chief Sealth, a local Native American who had befriended the newcomers.

In the middle of town, on the waterfront, Henry Yesler built the first steam-powered lumber mill on Puget Sound. It stood at the foot of what is now Yesler Way, which for many years was referred to as Skid Road, a reference to the way logs were skidded down to the sawmill from the slopes behind town. Over the years, Skid Road developed a reputation for its bars and brothels. Some say that after an East Coast journalist incorrectly referred to it as Skid Row in his newspaper, the name stuck and was subsequently applied to derelict neighborhoods all over the country. To this day, despite attempts to revamp the neighborhood, Yesler Way continues to attract the sort of visitors you would expect (due in part to the presence in the neighborhood of missions and homeless shelters), but it is also in the center of the Pioneer Square Historic District, one of Seattle's main tourist destinations.

By 1889, Seattle had more than 25,000 inhabitants and was well on its way to becoming the most important city in the Northwest. On June 6 of that year, however, 25 blocks in the center of town burned to the ground. By that time the city, which had spread out onto low-lying land reclaimed from the mud flats, had begun experiencing problems with mud and sewage disposal. The fire gave citizens the opportunity they needed to rebuild their town. The solution to the drainage and sewage problems was to regrade the steep slopes to the east of the town and raise the streets above their previous levels. Because the regrading lagged behind the rebuilding, the ground floors of many new buildings eventually wound up below street level. When the new roads and sidewalks were constructed at the level that had previously been the second floor of most buildings, the former ground-floor stores and businesses moved up into the light of day and the spaces below the sidewalk were left to businesses of shady character. Today, sections of this Seattle underground can be toured.

Among the most amazing engineering feats that took place after the fire was the leveling of two of Seattle's hills. Although Seattle once had eight hills, there are now only six -- nothing is left of either Denny Hill or Jackson Street Hill. Hydraulic mining techniques, using high-powered water jets to dig into the hillsides, leveled both of these hills. Today the Jackson Street Hill has become the flat area to the west of the International District, while Denny Hill, is now the flat neighborhood just south of Seattle Center. This latter area has historically been known as the Denny Regrade, but is best known today as Belltown.

Eight years later, another event changed the city almost as much as the fire had. On July 17, 1897, the steamship Portland arrived in Seattle from Alaska, carrying a ton of gold from the recently discovered Klondike goldfields. Within the year, Seattle's population swelled with prospectors heading north. Few of them ever struck it rich, but they all stopped in Seattle to purchase supplies and equipment, thus lining the pockets of local merchants and spreading far and wide the name of this obscure Northwest city. When the prospectors came south again with their hard-earned gold, much of it never left Seattle, sidetracked by beer halls and brothels.

In 1916, not many years after the Wright brothers made their first flight, Seattle residents William Boeing and Clyde Esterveld launched their first airplane, a floatplane, from the waters of Lake Union. Their intention was to operate an airmail service to Canada. Their enterprise eventually became the Boeing Company, which grew to be the largest single employer in the area. Until recently, Seattle's fortunes were so inextricably bound to those of Boeing that hard times for the aircraft manufacturer meant hard times for the whole city. While Boeing still employs thousands of people in the Seattle metropolitan area, it no longer controls the city's economic fate. With the founding of a little computer software company called Microsoft, Seattle's economy began to diversify, and with that diversity has come a new, broad-based prosperity that has profoundly changed the landscape and character of Seattle.

Seattle Today

Seattle is booming. A walk around the downtown can easily lead you to conclude that every vacant lot in the city is being turned into an office tower or some sort of combination hotel and condominiums. In the case of Paul Allen's new South Lake Union development, an entire neighborhood is being transformed from low-rise warehouses and apartments into high-rise condominiums and hotels. Even many of the city's once-sleepy neighborhoods have sprouted construction cranes. North Seattle's Ballard and Fremont neighborhoods have been transformed from quiet urban backwaters into enclaves of hipness. What this all adds up to is a nearly palpable buzz. There is an electricity in the air. Seattle is hot and it knows it.

Much of the buzz in Seattle is due to Microsoft and the other high-tech companies, including Adobe and Amazon, that call the metro area home. These companies have helped shape the city's demographics to the point that Seattle is now a city of young, well-educated computer nerds. The city is also notoriously liberal and has a large gay and lesbian community. Consequently, Seattle today embraces diversity, as well as all the latest trends and technologies, and is constantly looking to the future.

Seattle began looking to the future way back in 1962 when it hosted Century 21, the Seattle World's Fair. Gazing into its future, the city envisioned bold new architectural landmarks, and so, for the World's Fair, the cloud-impaling Space Needle was erected. Today, this once-futuristic tower, with its flying saucer observation deck perched atop an enormous tripod, is the most recognizable structure on the Seattle skyline. Situated just north of downtown in the Seattle Center complex that was the site of the World's Fair, the Space Needle provides stupendous views of the city and all its surrounding natural beauty. Today the design looks far less 21st century than it once did, and over the 40-plus years since the Space Needle was erected, the skyline it overlooks has changed radically. Now, at the start of the 21st century, the Seattle skyline has become increasingly dominated by towering skyscrapers, symbols of Seattle's ever-growing wealth and its importance as a gateway to the Pacific Rim.

The 1962 World's Fair was far more than a fanciful vision of the future -- it was truly prophetic for Seattle. The emergence of this city as a Pacific Rim trading center was a step toward a brighter future. The Seattle area has witnessed extraordinary growth in recent years, tens of thousands of people moving to the city in search of jobs, a better quality of life, and a mild climate. To keep pace with its sudden prominence on the Pacific Rim, Seattle has rushed to transform itself from a sleepy Northwest backwater into a cosmopolitan, world-class metropolis. New theaters, museums, sports stadiums, and even neighborhoods have cropped up around the city in recent years as new residents have demanded more from their city.

Positioning itself as a major metropolis has meant thinking big, and to this end Seattle has stayed busy in recent years adding (and subtracting) large, sometimes controversial structures to its ever-changing cityscape. In 2000 Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen opened his Experience Music Project, a museum of rock 'n' roll that started out as a simple memorial to hometown rocker Jimi Hendrix. The museum structure, designed by visionary architect Frank Gehry, is meant to conjure up images of a melted electric guitar and is one of the most bizarre-looking buildings on the planet. In 2004, Allen opened a Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame inside this same building.

Also in 2000 Seattle's venerable and much-disparaged Kingdome came crashing down in a cloud of dust as demolition experts imploded the massive cement structure to make way for a new football stadium for the Seattle Seahawks, the NFL team that happens to be owned by Paul Allen. The new stadium seamed to inspire the Seahawks to become a much better team, and in February 2006, they played the Pittsburgh Steelers in the SuperBowl, but failed to return home the winners.

Allen has also been behind the redevelopment of land that once surrounded the Kingdome, and is currently working on a major development project just north of downtown Seattle. This new neighborhood, still very much a work in progress, has come to be known as South Lake Union, and, when completed, will connect the lake with downtown. A streetcar line is even being built through the area.

In case you're beginning to think that sports stadiums and shrines to sci-fi and rock 'n' roll mean this city ain't got no culture, you should know that recent years have also seen the opening of both the new Seattle Central Library, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, and the Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, which is home to the Seattle Opera and the Pacific Northwest Ballet. The former building is a strangely skewed multistory box of glass and steel that is filled with light (and books) and instantly became one of the city's most fascinating attractions. Best of all, there's no charge to visit. In 2007, a new and much expanded Seattle Art Museum reopened to the public, as did the art museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. The summer of 2007 also saw the completion of an expansion at the Seattle Aquarium.

The rapid urbanization and upscaling of this once sleepy city can be seen not only in its cultural edifices but also on the shopping bags from downtown's Sixth Avenue and Pine Street shopping district. Where once the names were Nordstrom, Pendleton, Eddie Bauer, and REI (all Northwest companies), today they are just as likely to be Banana Republic, Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, and even Cartier and Tiffany. Until two decades ago, Seattle was primarily a conglomeration of quaint neighborhoods from which people commuted into downtown. Today, however, people are both working and living in the city center. Throughout the Belltown neighborhood, along the waterfront, and in the new South Lake Union neighborhood, high-rise water-view condominiums have sprouted, and today the downtown area is an active and vital urban center.

However, the change isn't limited to downtown, Belltown, and South Lake Union. North Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, long a bastion of artistic expression and hippie aesthetics, is now home to a campus of software giant Adobe. Amazon.com claims a hilltop location in South Seattle. Ballard, long a middle-class Scandinavian neighborhood, has also taken on a much more contemporary feel and is especially popular as a place for young families to put down roots.

Nowhere, though, is Seattle's youthful character more apparent than on the streets of Belltown, Seattle's hippest neighborhood and its coolest nightlife district. With dozens of restaurants, stylish bars, and hip nightclubs, this is where the beautiful people of Seattle spend their evenings. A walk through Belltown along First and Second avenues just north of Pike Place Market will turn up a tempting array of interesting (and often pricey) restaurants on almost every block. In summer the crowds spill out onto the sidewalks, waiting at sidewalk tables for the sun to go down and the action to begin.

The city's high-tech industry has spawned an entire generation of cellphone-toting hipsters who don their very best basic black outfits whenever they head out for a night of bar-hopping in Belltown. By day, however, many of these same young Seattleites can be seen driving around with mountain bikes and sea kayaks on the roofs of their SUVs and Subaru Outbacks. So when you pack for your visit to Seattle, be sure to include lots of black clothes, a colorful rain jacket, hiking boots, and high heels. Just don't bother bringing the plaid flannel shirt--grunge is gone, dude.

All the rapid growth in Seattle has, of course, had its drawbacks, and chief among these is traffic congestion. Spend even a short time in the city and you're likely to hear people griping about the traffic. Seattle's traffic congestion has become infamous on the West Coast, with frequent comparisons to the traffic of Los Angeles. However, a light-rail system is currently under construction, and the city's downtown bus tunnel is now being retrofitted to handle light-rail cars. Unfortunately, the light at the end of the bus tunnel is still a ways off, so you can expect Seattle traffic to be bad when you visit (leave plenty of time in your schedule whenever you get behind the wheel). While visiting downtown Seattle, the best thing you can do is stay out of your car; it's best to use it only for excursions out of the city.

Traffic jams aside, Seattle is a lot of fun to visit, and if your life happens to revolve around boating, gardening, or food, you'll absolutely love it here. Boating is a Seattle obsession, and few cities anywhere can offer as wide a range of choices to get you on the water--from kayaks to cruise ships and everything in between. Want to paddle a kayak up to a restaurant and order a dozen raw oysters? You can do it here. Want to sail off into the sunset? No problem. Putter around in a steam-powered wooden boat? Easy. So boat-oriented is Seattle that the opening day of boating season is one of the city's biggest and most popular annual events.

The mild climate here, tempered by the waters of Puget Sound, has also made Seattle one of the most garden-obsessed cities in the nation. Spring vacations in Seattle should include visits to the city's various public gardens, and a drive or walk around any residential neighborhood in the spring can serve as a de facto garden tour. I spend a lot of time in Seattle each spring and early summer, and it only takes one visit to the Queen Anne neighborhood to make me wish I were back in my own garden dividing perennials and reconstructing my mixed borders.

Food, glorious food! These words seem to be a Seattle mantra, and as far as food goes, Pike Place Market is the gourmand's Valhalla. Sure, the market may be crowded with tourists most of the year, but it still serves as a source of produce and other hard-to-find cooking ingredients for both casual cooks and some of the city's best chefs. Pike Place Market is also fertile ground for new culinary concepts. The market now has an artisan cheese maker, a wine bar specializing in Washington wines, a gourmet-to-go place, gelaterias, and even a shop specializing in truffle oils. What was once the only Starbucks in the world is also here in the market. You may be able to take a bite of the big apple in New York, but here in Seattle, you can take a bite of a Washington state apple (big or otherwise), a Rainier cherry, a marionberry, a Dungeness crab, a Willapa Bay oyster, and countless other great local food finds. And to wash it all down? Why, a double tall nonfat latte or a Washington state merlot, of course.