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About Seattle, WA

Seattle is the capital of the state of Washington, the seat of King county (1853), the biggest metropolis in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the largest and wealthiest metropolitan centres in the United States. Seattle is a significant port of entry and an air and sea gateway to Asia and Alaska. It is located along Puget Sound, a deep inland arm of the northern Pacific Ocean, and is in the heart of a conurbation that is approximately bounded by Everett to the north, Bellevue to the east, and Tacoma to the south.

On November 13, 1851, the city of West Seattle was founded. The next year, it was transferred to a site across Elliott Bay near a Duwamish Indian hamlet. It was named after the Native American chieftain Seattle, head of the Duwamish, Suquamish, and other Puget Sound tribes. Surrounding the city are areas of outstanding natural beauty, such as the thickly wooded Olympic Peninsula and the Cascade Range. Its urban core, dominated by tall buildings overlooking Elliott Bay and complemented by the city’s numerous parks and neighbourhoods, is also appealing.

Seattle, like other western towns in the United States, commands the resources of a vast hinterland that stretches all the way east to the Great Plains of Montana. Connected to worldwide distribution networks by road, rail, sea, and air, the city has developed to take on international economic importance, owing greatly to Seattle’s status as one of the world‘s leading centres for high-tech manufacturing and Internet-based commerce. Incorporated in 1865; incorporated in 1869. 83.9 square miles in size (217.3 square km). (2020) 737,015; Seattle-Bellevue-Kent Metro Division, 3,097,632; Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metro Area, 4,018,762.

Seattle is a metropolis with diverse neighbourhoods and urban districts that, despite their proximity, differ from one street to the next. Some neighbourhoods, particularly those southwest of the city centre near the Duwamish Waterway, are industrial in nature, including train yards, wharves, cranes, and low-income housing developments. Others, mostly outside the city centre, are examples of the wealth created by Seattle’s thriving high-technology sector.

Seattle’s districts have a comfortably comfortable but not flashy atmosphere, with clean family homes and townhouses populated by industrial employees, artists, professors, professionals, and that strange class of technology workers dubbed “microserfs” by author Douglas Coupland. The city is more tightly linked to its downtown region than most of its equivalents in the American West, and significant effort has been made to promote the city centre as a location to live and work.

Seattle is a vibrant city that is alive with industrial, economic, and cultural activity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Its seas are teeming with big oceangoing ships, its streets are teeming with vehicles, its rail lines are teeming with transcontinental freighters and passenger trains, and its skies are teeming with aircraft of all types. Despite the city’s reputation as a financial and commercial centre, its residents place a high emphasis on the arts, literature, sports, and other cultural activities; it has vast arenas, multistory bookstores, dozens of museums and galleries, and several instances of public art.

The city has a dense population. The metropolitan area has expanded to include formerly remote satellites such as Everett and Renton. The transition from urban to bedroom communities is the result of various economic factors, including the significant rise in the cost of family housing within cities. Many Seattle residents have chosen to travel from outlying yet more inexpensive places. By the early twenty-first century, 200,000 people commuted from neighbouring areas to downtown Seattle, causing significant traffic and interruptions on interstate and regional roadways. Despite high real estate costs, the inner city has remained attractive among some demographics, such as young renters.

Seattle flourished swiftly during the close of the twentieth century, assisted by the entrance of workers—many of them highly trained and educated—from all over the world, as well as from recession-prone southern Seattle. Growth, a recurring theme in Seattle’s history, has been so persistent in Seattle and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest that regional planners now place the city at the heart of an emerging region known as “Cascadia,” a 400-mile (645-kilometer) corridor stretching from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia. Cascadia’s business significance grows significantly year after year. Other urban expansion plans include Seattle as part of a conurbation known as “Pugetopolis,” which stretches southwest along Puget Sound as far as Olympia.

Despite its huge development, Seattle maintains a high level of social and public services, good schools, and an abundance of parks and greenbelts, earning it the nickname “the Emerald City.” It is routinely ranked as one of the most livable cities in North America, and despite the ups and downs of a highly volatile information-technology sector, its fortunes appear to be on the rise.

Seattle is located on the southeastern edge of Puget Sound, a 100-mile (160-kilometer) long inlet of the northern Pacific Ocean. The city’s heart confronts Elliott Bay, a deep-floored expansion. The 8-mile- (13-kilometer-) long Lake Washington Ship Canal connects Puget Sound to the northwest at Shilshole Bay. The canal runs through Lake Union, Portage Bay, and Union Bay to Lake Washington, a 22-mile (35-kilometer) tract of fresh water surrounded by vibrant cities and villages, some of which are connected to Seattle by bridge. In Puget Sound, Bainbridge and Vashon islands have several bedroom communities, and cities around the sound are progressively being merged into the Seattle conurbation.

Information about Seattle