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Seattle is the largest city in the state of Washington, and in the northwestern United States. It is situated between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, about 108 miles (180 km) south of the Canadian border, in King County, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 563,374. The first white settlers arrived in 1851 at Alki Point, and the first plats for the Town of Seattle were filed in 1853. The city was incorporated in 1869, after having existed as an incorporated town from 1865 to 1867.

Seattle is named after Noah Sealth, chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes, better known as Chief Seattle. David Swinson ("Doc") Maynard, one of the city founders, was the primary advocate for naming the city after Chief Seattle. Previously, the city had been known as Duwamps (or Duwumps).

Claims to fame: landmarks, character, and notable events

File:Seattlepikeplace2002.JPG
Seattle's Pike Place Market

The Space Needle is possibly Seattle's most famous landmark, featured in the logo of the television show Frasier, and dating from the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, a World's fair. The monorail constructed for the Exposition still runs today between Seattle Center and downtown. It will be torn down when the new, mass-transit monorail is built from Ballard through downtown to West Seattle.

Other famous landmarks include the Smith Tower, Pike Place Market (pictured), and the Experience Music Project.

In 1981, Seattle held a contest to come up with a new official nickname. The winner, selected in 1982, was the Emerald City, a slogan submitted by Californian Sarah Sterling-Franklin. From 1869 to 1982, Seattle's official nickname was the Queen City.

Seattle is sometimes referred to as the "rainy city." Although it gets less rain than many other US cities (it averages 38 inches of rainfall per year, compared to 47.3 inches in New York City, Seattle has more cloudy (294 days per year on average vs. 259 in New York City) and rainy days, with few heavy downpours. It is also known as Jet City, due to the heavy influence of Boeing.

Seattle is known as the home of grunge music, has a reputation for heavy coffee consumption, and was the site of the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization shut down by anti-globalist demonstrators.

Seattle Institutions

Cultural events

Museums and galleries

Educational institutions

Seattle is home to many institutions of higher learning, including:

Newspapers

As of 2003, two major daily newspapers and several weekly papers are published in Seattle:

Medical centers and hospitals

Seattle is also well served medically; hospitals in the community include:

  • Swedish Medical Center (including the former Providence and Ballard General Hospitals)
  • Harborview Medical Center, the only Level I trauma hospital serving Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Montana
  • The University of Washington Medical Center
  • Virginia Mason Medical Center
  • Northwest Hospital
  • Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center
  • Group Health Central Hospital and Family Health Center
  • The VA Puget Sound Health Care System's Seattle Division.

In addition, Seattle was a pioneer in the development of modern paramedic services with the establishment of Medic One in 1970. A 60 Minutes story on the success of Medic One that aired in 1974 called Seattle "the best place in the world to have a heart attack." Some accounts report that Puyallup, Washington, an area south of Seattle, was the first place west of the Mississippi to have 911 emergency telelphone service.

Seattle's First Hill is also known as "Pill Hill" because, in addition to being the current home of Harborview, Swedish, and Virginia Mason, it was also once the location of the Maynard, Seattle General, and Doctors Hospitals (now merged into Swedish), as well as Cabrini Hospital.

Sports teams

Seattle is home to the following professional sports teams:

Companies

Until 2001, Seattle was home to Boeing. Following a bidding war in which several cities offered huge tax breaks, Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago. The Seattle area is still home to Boeing's commercial airplanes division and several Boeing plants. Major companies whose headquarters still remain in the Seattle area include:

AT&T Wireless, Eddie Bauer, Microsoft, and Nintendo of America are based in the suburb of Redmond. The Frank Russell Company, Labor Ready, Inc., and Weyerhaeuser are based in nearby Tacoma. Expedia.com, PACCAR, and T-Mobile USA are based in Bellevue. Costco is based in Issaquah. R.E.I. is based in Kent.

History

Founding

The founding of Seattle is usually dated from the arrival of the Denny Party on November 13, 1851 at Alki Point. The group had travelled overland from the Midwest to Portland, Oregon, then made a short ocean journey up the coast into Puget Sound, with the express intent of founding a town. The next April, they abandoned their original site at Alki in favor of a better protected site on Elliott Bay, near the south end of what is now downtown Seattle.

The first plats for Seattle were filed on May 23, 1853. Doc Maynard's land claim lay south of today's Yesler Way, encompassing Pioneer Square and the International District. He based his street grid on strict compass bearings. The more northerly plats of Arthur A. Denny and Carson D. Boren, however, which encompassed Pioneer Square and the western slope of First Hill, had street grids that more or less followed the shoreline. (The downtown grid from Yesler Way north to Stewart Street is oriented 32 degrees west of north; from Stewart north to Denny Way the orientation is 49 degrees west of north.) This results in a tangle of streets wherever the cardinal-direction and angled grids clash.

Seattle started out as a logging town and developed rapidly into a small city. Henry Yesler established a sawmill on the waterfront where Maynard and Boren's plats met. The road leading down the hill to that mill, for a while Mill Street and now known as Yesler Way, was originally known as the Skid Road (the route for skidding logs down to the mill), hence the term "Skid Row" for a seamy red light district.

Despite being officially founded by the Methodists of the Denny Party, Seattle quickly developed a reputation as a wide-open town, a haven for prostitution, liquor, and gambling. Some attribute this, at least in part, to Maynard, who arrived separately from the Denny Party, and who had a rather different view of what it would take to build a city. The city's first brothel dated from 1861 and was founded by one John Pinnell (or Pennell), who was already involved in similar business in San Francisco.

Real estate records show that nearly all of the city's first 60 businesses were on, or immediately adjacent to, Denny's plat.

Relations with the Indians

Smallpox epidemic among the Northwest tribes 1862.

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The early years

The first Seattle fortunes were founded on logs, and later milled timber, shipped south for the construction of buildings in San Francisco. Seattle itself, in the early years, was, of course, also a place of wooden buildings, and remained so until the Great Fire of June 6, 1889. Even the early system of delivering water to the settlement used hollowed-out logs for pipes.

The University of the Territory of Washington (later the University of Washington) opened on November 4, 1861. Originally, it was little more than a glorified high school, but over time it grew into its originally grandiose name.

Seattle was incorporated as a town January 14, 1865. That charter was voided two years later January 18, 1867. Seattle was re-incorporated as a city on December 2, 1869. At this time, the population was approximately 1,000.

On July 14, 1873 the Northern Pacific Railroad announced that they had chosen the then-hamlet of Tacoma, Washington over Seattle as the Western terminus of their trans-continental railroad. The railroad barons appear to have been gambling on the advantage they could gain from being able to buy up the land around their terminus cheaply instead of bringing the railroad into a more established Pacific port town.

Unwilling to be bypassed, the citizens of Seattle chartered their own railroad, the Seattle & Walla Walla. This project did not get very far. The later Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern was only moderately more successful, although it did provide a route for logs to come to the city from as far away as Arlington, Washington. Much of the route of the Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern, which had, over the years, been incorporated into the Northern Pacific and then the Burlington Northern railways, but which was abandoned in 1971, became in 1978 a foot and bicycle route known as the Burke-Gilman Trail. The Great Northern did finally come to Seattle in 1884, but it would be 1906 before Seattle finally acquired a major rail passenger terminal.

As has been remarked, Seattle in this era was an "open" and often relatively lawless town. Although it boasted two newspapers (and, for a while, a third in Norwegian, and telephones had arrived in town, lynch law often prevailed (there were at least four lynchings in 1882, schools barely operated, and indoor plumbing was a rare novelty. In the low mud flats where much of the city was built, sewage was almost as likely to come in on the tide as to flow away. Potholes in the street were so bad as to cause at least one fatal drowning.

In an era during which the Washington Territory was one of the first parts of the U.S. to (briefly) allow women's suffrage, Seattle women attempted to counter these trends and to be a civilizing influence. On April 4, 1884, 15 Seattle women founded The Ladies Relief Society to address "the number of needy and suffering cases within the limits of the city." This eventually resulted in the founding of the Seattle Children's Home, still in operation today.

Another sign of encroaching civilization was the city's first streetcar, in 1884, followed by a cable car from downtown over First Hill to Leschi Park in 1887. In 1885, the city passed an ordinance requiring attached sewer lines for all new residences. In 1886, the city got its first YMCA gymnasium, and in 1888 the exclusive Rainier Club was founded. On December 24, 1888, ferry service was inaugurated, connecting Seattle to West Seattle, near the location of the Denny Party's first attempt at settling at Alki. A year later, a bridge was built across Salmon Bay, providing a land route to the nearby town of Ballard, which eventually would be annexed to Seattle.

The early Seattle era came to a stunning halt with the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889.

Relations between whites and Chinese

In 1883 Chinese laborers played a keyrole in the first effort at digging the Montlake Cut to connect Lake Union's Portage Bay to Lake Washington's Union Bay.

In 1885-1886, whites and Indians, complaining of overly cheap labor competition, drove the Chinese settlers from Seattle, Tacoma, and other Northwest cities.

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The fire

As with so many of the fires that destroyed cities during this period, the origin of the Great Seattle Fire (June 6, 1889) is clouded in legend. An early newspaper report clamied that the fire began with a glue pot spilled by one James McGough. Although the Seattle Post-Intelligencer corrected the story within weeks, to this day James McGough's glue pot remains as much a legend as Mrs. O'Leary's cow. (Apparently the fire was started by a tipped glue pot, but in a different part of the building than the unfortunate McGough's paint store.)

The fire burned 29 city blocks (almost entirely wooden buildings; about 10 brick buildings also burned). It destroyed nearly the entire business district, all of the railroad terminals, and all but four of the wharves.

Rebuilding from the ashes

The city rebuilt from the ashes with astounding rapidity. The fire had done a fine job of cleansing the town of rats and other vermin; a new zoning code resulted in a downtown of brick and stone buildings, rather than wood. In the single year after the fire, the city grew from 25,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, largely because of the enormous number of construction jobs suddenly created.

Still, south of Yesler Way, the open city atmosphere remained. The most famous figure in this wide open district would be the flamboyant madame Lou Graham, who arrived in Seattle in 1888 and made herself a force to be reckoned with in the city's politics until her premature death in 1903.

A massive effort was made to level the extreme hills that were south and north of the bustling city. From 1900 to 1914 the Denny Regrade to the north and the Jackson Regrade to the south leveled more than 120 feet of Denny Hill and parts of First and Beacon Hills. The Denny Regrade continued in spurts until 1930. Dirt from the Jackson Regrade filled in the swampy tidelands that are now occupied by the SoDo neighborhood as well as Safeco Field and Seahawks Stadium. A seawall containing dirt from the Denny Regrade created the current waterfront. More dirt from the Denny Regrade went to build the industrial Harbor Island at the mouth of the Duwamish sout of Downtown.


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Labor history in 19th century Seattle

The Pacific Northwest economy during the nineteenth century was heavily rooted in extractive industries, mainly logging. Still, Seattle was becoming a city, and union organizing arrived first in the form of a skilled craft union. In 1882, Seattle printers formed the Seattle Typographical Union Local 202. Dockworkers followed in 1886, cigarmakers in 1887, tailors in 1889, and both brewers and musicians in 1890. Even the newsboys unionized in 1892, followed by more organizing, mostly of craft unions.

The history of labor in this period is inseparable from the issue of anti-Chinese vigilantism, as discussed above. Although a rough-and-ready approach to labor organizing was typical of the period, there is no question that white Seattle-area laborers at this time saw cheap Chinese labor as their prime competition and strove to eliminate it by eliminating the Chinese immigrants.

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The Klondike Gold Rush

Seattle was especially hard hit by the 1896 economic crash. Unlike many other cities, it soon found salvation in the form of becoming the jumping off point for the Klondike gold rush. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer scooped all other U.S. newpapers with the story of that a "ton of gold" had arrived on a boat from Alaska. Seattle promoters successfully convinced the world that Seattle was the place to outfit yourself for the journey to Alaska. The miners mined the gold. Seattle mined the miners.

Seattle's relationship with Alaska during this period was generally one of rapacity. Besides the mining, on October 18, 1899, a Chamber of Commerce "Committee of Fifteen," just back from a goodwill visit to Alaska, proudly unveiled a 60-foot totem pole from Fort Tongass, Alaska in Pioneer Square. The problem was, the totem had been stolen from a Tlingit village. A federal grand jury in Alaska indicted eight of Seattle's most prominent citizens for theft of government property.

Events

Government

(as of the November 2003 elections) Mayor:
Greg Nickels
City Council:
Jean Godden, Richard Conlin, Peter Steinbrueck, Jan Drago, Tom Rasmussen, Nick Licata, David Della, Richard McIver, Jim Compton

Bertha Knight Landes was mayor from 1926 to 1928. She was the first woman mayor of a major American city.


Geography

Seattle is located along the Puget Sound, in between two large mountain ranges, the Olympics and the Cascades. The climate is mild, with the temperature moderated by the sea and protected from winds and storms by the mountains. The area is hilly, though it flattens out as one moves out from the center of the city. There are two large lakes, Lake Washington and Lake Union, and many smaller ones. The rivers, forests, lakes, and fields were once rich enough to support one of the worlds few sedentary hunter-gatherer societies. Opportunities for sailing, skiing, bicycling, camping, and hiking are close by and accessible almost all of the year.

Seattle is located at 47°37'35" North, 122°19'59" West (47.626353, -122.333144)1.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 369.2 km² (142.5 mi²). 217.2 km² (83.9 mi²) of it is land and 152.0 km² (58.7 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 41.16% water.

Bodies of water: Lake Washington, Union Bay, Montlake Cut, Portage Bay, Lake Union, Fremont Cut, Salmon Bay, Shilshole Bay, Lake Washington Ship Canal, Puget Sound, Elliott Bay, Duwamish River, Green Lake, Haller Lake, Bitter Lake, University Slough, Ravenna Creek, Thornton Creek, Piper's Creek, Arboretum Creek, Longfellow Creek, Fauntleroy Creek, Smith Cove

Demographics

As of the census of 2000, there are 563,374 people, 258,499 households, and 113,481 families residing in the city. The population density is 2,593.5/km² (6,717.0/mi²). There are 270,524 housing units at an average density of 1,245.4/km² (3,225.4/mi²). The racial makeup of the city is 70.09% White, 8.44% African American, 1.00% Native American, 13.12% Asian, 0.50% Pacific Islander, 2.38% from other races, and 4.46% from two or more races. 5.28% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There are 258,499 households out of which 17.9% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 32.7% are married couples living together, 8.1% have a female householder with no husband present, and 56.1% are non-families. 40.8% of all households are made up of individuals and 9.3% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 2.08 and the average family size is 2.87.

In the city the population is spread out with 15.6% under the age of 18, 11.9% from 18 to 24, 38.6% from 25 to 44, 21.9% from 45 to 64, and 12.0% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 35 years. For every 100 females there are 99.5 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 98.8 males.

The median income for a household in the city is $45,736, and the median income for a family is $62,195. Males have a median income of $40,929 versus $35,134 for females. The per capita income for the city is $30,306. 11.8% of the population and 6.9% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total people living in poverty, 13.8% are under the age of 18 and 10.2% are 65 or older.

Official Flower, Slogan, and Song

  • Flower: Dahlia (1913)
  • Slogans: "The City of Flowers" (1942); "The City of Goodwill" (1990) (for the Goodwill Games held that year in Seattle)
  • Song: "Seattle the Peerless City" (1909)

Annexed Towns

  • South Seattle, 1905-1905
  • Ballard, 1890-1907
  • Columbia City, 1893-1907
  • West Seattle, 1902-1907
  • South Park, 1905-1907
  • Ravenna, 1906-1907
  • Southeast Seattle, 1906-1907
  • Georgetown, 1904-1910

The City's Neighborhoods

Annexation dates follow each name, unless the neighborhood was part of the area of first incorporation.

Seattle Metro Area

The Seattle metro area is made up of some or all of the following counties:

Complete listings of the cities in the immediate area are above. The following list is a subset of the full list:

Major Highways

Airports

See also

Other uses of the term "Seattle" include: Chief Seattle

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