Seattle Audio Tours

Seattle was carved out of old-growth forest on an isthmus between Puget Sound and Lake Washington in 1851, named for a Duwamish chief who never asked for the honour, and then proceeded to reinvent itself every generation. It was a logging camp, then a Gold Rush supply town, then the city that built the bombers that won the Second World War, then the city that built the planes everyone else flew, then the city where the music got loud and dirty in a way that mattered, and then the city where two software companies absorbed a large portion of the global economy. Not bad for a place that gets 150 days of measurable rainfall per year.

That rain, incidentally, is often misrepresented.

The annual total is lower than Houston or Miami. What Seattle gets is persistence: grey drizzle rather than dramatic downpours, the kind of weather that keeps people inside coffee shops long enough to have ideas. The original Starbucks opened at Pike Place Market on March 30, 1971, but the real coffee culture of the city has always been the independent places, the espresso bars tucked into Capitol Hill storefronts, the roasters in South Lake Union. Pike Place Market itself, opened in 1907, sits on a bluff over Elliott Bay and is still genuinely a working farmers market, not a theme park.