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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.
Downtown Seattle's main attractions are the busy stalls and cafés
of Pike Place Market and the restored nineteenth-century Pioneer
Square , lined with restaurants and taverns. A stroll along the
more touristy waterfront lets you enjoy fabulous views of Elliott
Bay. At the Seattle Center in the north, the Space Needle presides
over cultural institutions and carnival rides, as well as the city's
latest draw, the Experience Music Project . Several outlying districts
are often livelier than downtown: Capitol Hill 's cafés and
bars are the heart of the city's hipster and gay scene, and the
University District is a student area with inexpensive cafés
and uptempo nightlife.
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