Cultural life
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Seattle enjoys a lively blend of cultural activities that draws on the city’s ethnic diversity, its tradition of municipal support for the arts, and its status as a regional and national educational and economic center. A distinctive component of Seattle’s daily life and popular culture is its relationship with coffee and coffeehouses. Seattle has the highest per capita coffee consumption in the United States, and Seattleites’ love of specialty coffee has enabled hundreds of independent shops to thrive in the city that also produced the retail chains Starbucks and Tully’s. It has been theorized that the city’s cloudy, drizzly climate gave the perfect impetus for coffee’s unusual degree of popularity; caffeinated drinks consumed in cozy shops and restaurants provide great balm as well as shelter from the dampness.
There are more than two dozen museums in Seattle. Among them are the Seattle Art Museum, with eclectic and well-curated holdings; the Seattle Asian Art Museum, with internationally important collections; the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, on the University of Washington campus, which has extensive ethnographic collections relating to the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest; and the Museum of History and Industry and the Pacific Science Center, both of which offer educational programs. Located in the International District, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience commemorates the contributions of Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian peoples to the history, politics, and culture of the region. The Nordic Heritage Museum is located in Ballard.
The city’s parks and streets include many examples of public art, among them the monumental sculptures of Seattle Center. At the end of the 1990s, the SODO (South of Downtown) Urban Art Corridor began the development of a landscaped district of murals and sculpture gardens. The Olympic Sculpture Park (opened 2007) is located on the waterfront overlooking Puget Sound; it features works by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, and others. Seattle’s literary community is served by the city-run Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, housed in a former synagogue designed by architect B. Marcus Priteca, and the Richard Hugo House, honoring a local poet, as well as by the city’s excellent public library system, the centerpiece of which is the Central Library, whose building was designed by Rem Koolhaas and former Seattleite Joshua Ramus.
Seattle has made many contributions to popular culture. It was the birthplace and childhood home of the legendary rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and gave rise to the grunge sound of the early 1990s, exemplified by such bands as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney, most of whom, at least initially, recorded for the pioneering local independent label Sub Pop. More recently, bands such as Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Band of Horses, and Fleet Foxes have energized Seattle’s still-vibrant music scene. The legacy of these performers and other artists is celebrated in the city’s architecturally innovative Experience Music Project museum, which was designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2000. (The museum expanded its focus and was renamed the Museum of Pop Culture in 2016.) The city is also a leading center of multimedia production, uniting technology, music, and the visual arts.
The Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, staffed predominantly by amateur musicians, offers well-attended concert series. The Seattle Repertory Theatre, the University of Washington School of Drama, and Pacific Northwest Ballet have drawn national attention for their productions. The Seattle Symphony, founded in 1903, was the first in the world to be conducted by a woman, and it has issued many recordings of live and studio performances. The symphony often performs in association with the Seattle Opera.
Among the city’s many annual cultural events are the Folklife Festival (Memorial Day weekend), the Earshot Jazz Festival (October), the music and arts festival known as Bumbershoot (Labor Day weekend), and Seafair (July), which features parades, hydroplane races, and air shows.
Through its culture, arts, and parks committee, Seattle’s city council administers a network of more than 70 public parks. The largest is Discovery Park, some 530 acres (214 hectares), which occupies most of the former site of the U.S. Army’s decommissioned Fort Lawton. Situated on a broad bluff overlooking Puget Sound, Discovery Park offers views of nearby beaches and distant mountains, nature preserves, natural meadows, forest groves, dunes, and tidal pools. Other popular parks include Gas Works Park, a 20-acre (8-hectare) tract on the grounds of a former coal-gas conversion plant; Woodland Park, once a private estate on Green Lake that now houses a zoo, ball fields, picnic grounds, and a large rose garden; Volunteer Park, which features a sculpture honouring the 1867 purchase of Alaska; and Alki Beach Park, which marks the first settlement of migrants from the United States in the area. One of the city’s most beloved parks surrounds Green Lake, in north Seattle; public attractions at Green Lake Park include a beach, boating facilities, paths for walking and jogging, and a community center. A historic site, Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, near Pioneer Square, commemorates the city’s role as a transportation hub and commercial center for the exploration and settlement of the Far North.
Tourism abounds in Seattle throughout the year. Apart from having its own attractions, including the Space Needle and the Seattle Aquarium, the city serves as a gateway to the San Juan Islands, Mount Rainier National Park, North Cascades National Park, and Olympic National Park and is close to several state parks and national wildlife refuges. Whale watching is a popular tourist activity; a park that has facilities for whale watching is located in the San Juan Islands, accessible by ferry boat. Other outdoor activities in and around Seattle include hiking, rock climbing, skiing, snowboarding, boating, and fishing.
Seattle has a range of professional sports teams. The Seattle Seahawks, a franchise of the National Football League, have played in the city since 1976, and the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team in the American League, have played in the city since 1977. These teams, along with the Seattle Storm, the city’s professional women’s basketball team, boast a large public following and heavily attended home games. Seattle was the home of the SuperSonics (better known as the Sonics) of the National Basketball Association from 1967 to 2008, when the franchise was relocated to Oklahoma City. The city gained a professional hockey team, the Seattle Kraken (named after the legendary sea monster and the giant Pacific octopus found in the waters of Puget Sound, where Seattle is situated), in 2021. The city has frequently also been home to men’s professional football (soccer) teams since the 1970s; the most recent incarnation of professional football in the city, the Sounders (the third Seattle team to carry that name), is a Major League Soccer team that attracted a passionate following beginning with its inaugural season in 2009. Long before professional sports became a part of Seattle’s cultural fabric, the University of Washington was the focus of sports spectatorship in the city, and the school’s teams continue to command the avid loyalty of Seattleites. The school’s gridiron football program has an especially rich history of success, but University of Washington teams have also made their mark in men’s and women’s basketball, rowing, softball, and volleyball.
History of Seattle
Early peoples and exploration
The Puget Sound region has been inhabited by humans for at least 12,000 years. By the time of the European arrival in North America, it was home to many distinct cultures, most of which had in common a fishing and hunting and gathering economy and some form of the gift-exchange system called the potlatch. When Europeans first explored the area of what is now Seattle, they encountered members of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Suquamish, Duwamish, Coast Salish, Makah, Quinault, and Chinook peoples, all of whom occasionally warred among themselves but were generally peaceful toward the newcomers.
The early modern history of the Seattle area, like that of the Northwest generally, is closely connected with expeditionary efforts to find the Northwest Passage and the subsequent development of the overseas trade with North Asia. Explorers in the service of Spain, notably Juan de Fuca, sailed along the Pacific coast of Washington and entered the far reaches of Puget Sound, as did Russian traders and explorers. However, Great Britain was the first European power to command the systematic exploration of the region. Spurred by Capt. James Cook’s reports of a thriving local market in sea otter skins that were traded with Russian and Chinese adventurers, the admiralty sent an experienced sailor, George Vancouver, to map the area and locate the Northwest Passage. Vancouver arrived in 1792 and named the inland sea for his second lieutenant, Peter Puget. Vancouver’s reports on the region’s economic possibilities and natural beauty encouraged further British exploration, but Britain’s nominal control over the area effectively ended with the arrival of American explorers, trappers, and traders in the following decade.
Settlement
In 1851 about two dozen settlers from Illinois, traveling aboard the schooner Exact via Portland in the Oregon Territory (where they had originally intended to settle), landed at Alki Point in what is now West Seattle. They soon established a community, the first permanent non-Native American settlement in the Seattle area, and began a logging operation. The beach at Alki Point proved to be too shallow to accommodate larger oceangoing timber transport vessels, so the following year the group searched for deeper anchorage in Puget Sound from Dash Point (near present-day Tacoma) to just beyond the mouth of the Duwamish River. They relocated their settlement near a Duwamish Indian village, Duwamps. (The site is now preserved at Pioneer Square, on the southern end of the modern downtown district.)
The new town was laid out in 1853 and initially was named for the neighboring Duwamish village, but it was later renamed to honor the leader of local Native American tribes, Seattle (Sealth), who had shown considerable hospitality to the settlers. City leaders faced disappointment that year when the Washington territorial government determined that its capital would be built in Olympia (although there was a short-lived movement in 1860 to make Vancouver the capital). Seattle, however, was named as the site for the University of Washington, founded in 1861, which proved to be of great significance to the city’s development. There were tense encounters with Native Americans, including an armed attack on the town of Seattle in 1856; the presence of the gunship Decatur and the arrival of U.S. ground forces ended the confrontation.
Immigration and development
In its early years, Seattle’s economy was dominated by logging; a steam-powered sawmill, owned by pioneer Henry Yesler, was the city’s major employer. The city was incorporated in 1869. It grew slowly—augmented by European immigrants recruited to work in the coalfields outside the city—until the arrival of an interstate railroad line. With the railroad, Seattle had supplanted San Francisco as the central transport point for the northern Pacific trade by the early 1880s. The period was marred by anti-Chinese riots, which resulted in the forced expulsion of nearly 200 Chinese residents in 1885–86. A disastrous fire in 1889 consumed the entire business district, destroying some 30 square blocks of brick and wood buildings as well as the city’s railroad terminals.
The arrival of the Great Northern Railway at Everett in 1893 spurred the rapid redevelopment of Seattle’s city center, which in turn led to explosive growth. The city’s population rose from 3,533 in 1880 to 80,671 in 1900. The waterfront served as the main supply depot for the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, and it quickly emerged as one of North America’s preeminent seaports, with more than 50 miles (80 km) of wharves. Seattle also gained national notoriety for its “open-city” policy, which allowed saloons, brothels, and casinos to operate without restriction and, although critics objected, encouraged criminality and official corruption.
