Seattle Travel
Museum of Flight
The biggest of Seattle's museums, the Museum of Flight , a twenty-minute bus ride (#174) south of downtown at 9404 E Marginal Way (daily 10am5pm, until 9pm on Thurs; $9.50, kids $5; www.museumofflight.org ), is partly housed in the magnificently restored 1909 "Red Barn" that was the original Boeing manufacturing plant. Displays of 54 airplanes lead from ancient prototypes to the Wright Brothers, from the growth of Boeing to a gallery hung with twenty full-sized aircraft and a replica of John Glenn's 1962 Mercury space capsule. One unmistakable highlight is the chance to sit in the cockpit of an SR-71 Blackbird, the type of spy plane once used to fly 80,000 feet above the jungles of Vietnam.
Seattle Center
The Seattle Center ( www.seattlecenter.com ) dates from the 1962 World's Fair, whose theme was "Century 21" (hence the rather outdated architecture and spindly, 600ft flying-saucer-tipped Space Needle tower). Since then the 74-acre complex has become a sort of culture park, staging major sporting events, concerts and festivals, as well as a longstanding site for ancient-looking carnival rides aimed at the pre-teen set. Amid this strange hodgepodge stands the Pacific Science Center, Seattle Opera (closed until 2003), Children's Museum, Experience Music Project, and various theaters. The Center is best reached by the monorail , which runs from the third floor of Westlake Center at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street downtown ($1.25 one-way; www.monorail.org ) and drops you close to the Space Needle , the Space Age-modernist city icon, which is most appealing at night when it's lit up. The panoramic view from the observation deck, where there's a bar, is unmatched (daily 8ammidnight; $11; kids $5; www.spaceneedle.com ).
Southwest of the needle, the Pacific Science Center (daily 10am5pm, weekends and summer open until 6pm; $8; www.pacsci.org ) is easily recognizable by its modernist white arches and shallow, stagnant "lake." The hands-on adventure park is full of science-related exhibits for children, and includes a planetarium and IMAX theater. Nearby lies the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project (daily 9am9pm, weekends open until 11pm; $19.95; www.experience.org ), a giant burst of colored metal made of sweeping aluminum curves into which the monorail passes that opened in June 2000. Inside is an 80,000-piece strong collection of rock memorabilia divided up into exhibits on different phases of popular music history, along with a gallery-shrine to the original Seattle guitar-god, Jimi Hendrix. As much an interior amusement park as a bona fide museum (check out the Sound Lab, where you can bang on drums and keyboards to your heart's delight), the "EMP" never loses the sense of freewheeling pleasure associated with 1960s rock and pop.
Seattle
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, 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 increasing traffic jams. As if to round out the turbulent decade, a February 2001 earthquake shook Seattle's foundations, and reminded its resi dents that they're just as prone to Pacific Rim tremors as their southern counterparts in the Golden State.
Despite the dizzying expansion, the city's more established neighborhoods remain distinctive, and Seattle has a pleasantly down-to-earth ambience.