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The City of Seattle,
Washington
There are many reasons the National Association
of Realtors has chosen Seattle as the most likely city in the nation to enjoy
the highest home appreciation over the next year.
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, home building, 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 well being, 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 Amazon.com
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 new home
building both in Seattle and outlaying areas.
Despite the dizzying expansion, the city's more
established neighborhoods remain distinctive, and Seattle has a pleasantly
down-to-earth ambience. Whether it's a
single family home, condo or townhouse, when you buy real estate in the greater Seattle area,
you are buying a piece of the great Seattle heritage as well.
The City of Seattle is a national leader in its
use of technology to inform and engage citizens in governmental affairs. Use
this portal to increase your civic awareness, understanding, and participation
in your City's government and to connect with City staff, departments, agencies,
and their services.
Seattle offers a wonderfully varied and vibrant
selection of cultural and recreational opportunities to entice visitors and
residents alike, including events, programs and venues offered by the Office
of Arts and Cultural Affairs and Seattle
Parks and Recreation.
Points of Interest
Links to the websites of points of interest
around Seattle.
Pacific
Science Center
Experience
Music Project
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