Seattle, Washington

Seattle, Washington, has contributed a bewildering array of archetypal images to the popular imagination—timber barons and Wobblies, Skid Road and Twin Peaks, Mercer Girls and Tugboat Annie, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, Boeing engineers and Microsoft wunderkinder, Smith Tower and the Space Needle, WTO, Rainy City, Jet City, Most Livable City, and Emerald City. Seattle looks outward, to Alaska and the Pacific Rim, and inward, to a fascination with civility and process; residents boast equally of rugged scenery and urban spectacle. The city's distinctive character has been formed by its physical setting and by its historical development.

Facing Elliott Bay on Puget Sound, the city is defined by waterfront, divided by lakes and ringed by mountains; from downtown's skyscrapers, one can see three national parks and two national forests. Seattle public parkland covers more than 5,000 acres, with the vintage Olmsted plan of boulevards and parks at its heart. But Seattle's cityscape is instantly identifiable; it is also one of the most heavily engineered cities in the United States, the setting reshaped by construction of a canal and locks to link Lake Washington with Elliott Bay, regrading the city's hills and straightening its rivers, filling the tide flats and building Harbor Island. Seattle is a cosmopolitan—almost international—West Coast American city. The closest West Coast port to Japan and China, Seattle is the fifth largest container port in the U.S. and links the Pacific Rim to North American highways and rail lines.

Seattle is Washington State's largest city. It's downtown and in-city neighborhoods cover 84 square miles of rolling land between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington. Seattle is the seat of suburban King County, and the hub of the sprawling metropolitan community that reaches from Everett south to Tacoma and Bremerton and east to the Cascade Mountains. Seattle's metropolitan growth has depended upon jobs and upon transportation: Two major interstate highways run north and south through corridors between the city and Lake Washington and between Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish. Lake Washington itself is bridged by two east-west highways.

At incorporation in 1865, Seattle covered only 10 square miles. The annexation of streetcar suburbs between 1883 and 1891 increased the city to 30 square miles. Then, between 1907 and 1910, Seattle more than doubled, annexing West Seattle and Ballard to the west, Laurelhurst to the north, and Rainier Valley to the south. After World War II, Seattle's northern boundary moved from NE 85th Street to NE 145th Street, incorporating a district then exploding with G.I. Bill residential suburbs, automobility, and the cutting-edge Northgate Shopping Center.

American settlers began arriving in Washington in the 1840s, pushing upward from the Columbia River. Native people—members of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes—lived in the place we now call [Page 708]Seattle. In 1848, Oregon Territory was admitted to the United States, incorporating the current states of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. American settlers arrived to found Seattle in 1851, naming the settlement to honor the local Duwamish chief. From the first, Seattle was consciously founded to be an industrial city, a shipping hub at the crossroads of continents.

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