The coffee capital of the world and the birthplace of grunge, Amazon, Boeing, and Starbucks — a rainy Pacific Northwest port city where Pike Place Market fishmongers throw salmon over tourists' heads and Nirvana played their first shows in the basements below
Seattle (750,000; metro 4.0 million) is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest and one of the fastest-growing in the US, driven by the presence of Amazon (founded in a Bellevue garage, 1994), Microsoft (Redmond), Boeing (originally Seattle, 1916), and a tech industry that has reshaped the city's demographics, housing market, and culture since the 1990s. Pike Place Market (1907, the oldest continuously operating public farmers' market in the US) sits on the waterfront bluff above Elliott Bay; the original Starbucks (1912 Pike Place) is around the corner. The grunge music scene that produced…
The Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples inhabited the Puget Sound area for thousands of years before European contact. Seattle was incorporated in 1865 and named after Chief Seattle (Si'ahl) of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples — the only major American city named after a Native American leader. The Great Seattle Fire of June 1889 destroyed 25 blocks of the city centre in a single day; the subsequent rebuilding on a higher grade raised the city's streets by an entire storey, leaving the original ground level accessible today as the Seattle Underground (Pioneer Square). Boeing's 1916 foun…