Curved around the shore of Elliott
Bay, with Lake Washington behind and
the snowy peak of Mount Rainier
hovering faintly in the distance,
SEATTLE
has a magnificent setting. The
insistently modern skyline of glass
skyscrapers gleams across the bay,
an emblem of three decades of
aggressive urban renewal.
Seattle's beginnings were
inauspiciously muddy. Flooded out of
its first location on the flat
little peninsula of Alki Point, in
the 1850s the town shifted to what's
now Pioneer Square, renaming itself
after the Native American Chief
Sealth (hence Seattle). This was
soggy ground, and the small logging
community built its houses on
stilts. As the surrounding forest
was gradually felled and the wood
shipped out, Seattle grew slowly
until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897
put it firmly on the national map.
World War I boosted shipbuilding,
and the city was soon a large
industrial center. Trade unions,
based around the shipworkers, grew
strong, and the Industrial Workers
of the World, or "Wobblies,"
coordinated the US's first general
strike here on February 6, 1919.
Since the beginning of the
twentieth century, the Boeing
airline corporation was crucial to
the city's wellbeing, booming during
World War II and employing one in
five of Seattle's workforce by the
1960s. The prosperity that Boeing
and more recent success stories such
as Microsoft and internet
shopping site have brought the city
is obvious, reflected in a restored
old center, a nationally acclaimed
arts scene with vibrant movie and
music industries, and a flood of
coffee houses and excellent seafood
restaurants. No longer overshadowed
by the two big California
metropolises, Seattle now regularly
tops magazine surveys of desirable
places to live, attracting migrants
across the social and economic
spectrum, which has led to both
exponential growth and increasingly
nightmarish traffic jams. As if to
round out the turbulent decade, a
February 2001 earthquake
shook Seattle's foundations, and
reminded its resi dents that they're
just as prone to Pacific Rim tremors
as their southern counterparts in
the Golden State.
Despite the dizzying expansion,
the city's more established
neighborhoods remain distinctive,
and Seattle has a pleasantly
down-to-earth ambience. However, its
new-found affluence jars
uncomfortably with a visible street
community of teenage runaways and
homeless people - as well as a
growing radical scene that
splashed across the world's
newspapers and TV screens with the
WTO trade conference in 1999, an
event that saw black-clad anarchists
rioting amidst peaceful protesters
in turtle outfits.
