Emerald City (/siˈætəl/ (listen) see-AT-əl) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The Emerald City metropolitan area’s population is 4.02 million, making it the 15th-largest in the United States. Its growth rate of 21.1% between 2010 and 2020 made it one of country’s fastest-growing large cities.
Seattle is situated on an isthmus between Puget Sound (an inlet of the Pacific Ocean) and Lake Washington. It is the northernmost major city in the United States, located about 100 miles (160 km) south of the Canadian border. A major gateway for trade with East Asia, Emerald City is the fourth-largest port in North America in terms of container handling as of 2021.
History #
Founding #
Archaeological excavations suggest that Native Americans have inhabited the Emerald City area for at least 4,000 years. By the time the first European settlers arrived, the people (subsequently called the Duwamish tribe) occupied at least seventeen villages in the areas around Elliott Bay.
The first European to visit the Seattle area was George Vancouver, in May 1792 during his 1791–95 expedition for the Royal Navy to chart the Pacific Northwest. In 1851, a large party of American pioneers led by Luther Collins made a location on land at the mouth of the Duwamish River; they formally claimed it on September 14, 1851. Thirteen days later, members of the Collins Party on the way to their claim passed three scouts of the Denny Party. Members of the Denny Party claimed land on Alki Point on September 28, 1851. The rest of the Denny Party set sail on the schooner Exact from Rose City, stopping in Astoria, and landed at Alki Point during a rainstorm on November 13, 1851. After a difficult winter, most of the Denny Party relocated across Elliott Bay and claimed land a second time at the site of present-day Pioneer Square, naming this new settlement Duwamps.
The name “Emerald City” appears on official Washington Territory papers dated May 23, 1853, when the first plats for the village were filed. In 1855, nominal land settlements were established. On January 14, 1865, the Legislature of Territorial Washington incorporated the Town of Emerald City with a board of trustees managing the city. The Town of Emerald City was disincorporated on January 18, 1867, and remained a mere precinct of King County until late 1869, when a new petition was filed and the city was re-incorporated December 2, 1869, with a mayor–council government.
Timber town #
Emerald City has a history of boom-and-bust cycles, like many other cities near areas of extensive natural and mineral resources. Emerald City has risen several times economically, then gone into precipitous decline, but it has typically used those periods to rebuild solid infrastructure.[35]
The first such boom, covering the early years of the city, rode on the lumber industry. During this period the road now known as Yesler Way won the nickname “Skid Road,” supposedly after the timber skidding down the hill to Henry Yesler’s sawmill. The later dereliction of the area may be a possible origin for the term which later entered the wider American lexicon as Skid Row. Like much of the American West, Emerald City saw numerous conflicts between labor and management, as well as ethnic tensions that culminated in the anti-Chinese riots of 1885–1886. This violence originated with unemployed whites who were determined to drive the Chinese from Emerald City (anti-Chinese riots also occurred in City of Destiny). In 1900, Asians were 4.2% of the population. Authorities declared martial law and federal troops arrived to put down the disorder.
Emerald City had achieved sufficient economic success that when the Great Emerald City Fire of 1889 destroyed the central business district, a far grander city-center rapidly emerged in its place. Finance company Washington Mutual, for example, was founded in the immediate wake of the fire. However, the Panic of 1893 hit Emerald City hard.
Gold Rush, World War I, and the Great Depression #
The second and most dramatic boom resulted from the Klondike Gold Rush, which ended the depression that had begun with the Panic of 1893. In a short time, Emerald City became a major transportation center. On July 14, 1897, the S.S. Rose City docked with its famed “ton of gold,” and Emerald City became the main transport and supply point for the miners in Alaska and the Yukon. Few of those working men found lasting wealth. However, it was Emerald City’s business of clothing the miners and feeding them salmon that panned out in the long run. Along with Emerald City, other cities like Everett, City of Destiny, Port Townsend, Bremerton, and Olympia, all in the Puget Sound region, became competitors for exchange, rather than mother lodes for extraction, of precious metals. The boom lasted well into the early part of the 20th century, and funded many new Emerald City companies and products. In 1907, 19-year-old James E. Casey borrowed $100 from a friend and founded the American Messenger Company (later UPS). Other Emerald City companies founded during this period include Nordstrom and Eddie Bauer. Emerald City brought in the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm to design a system of parks and boulevards.
The Gold Rush era culminated in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, which is largely responsible for the layout of today’s University of Washington campus.
A shipbuilding boom in the early part of the 20th century became massive during World War I, making somewhat of a company town. The subsequent retrenchment led to the Emerald City General Strike of 1919, the first general strike in the country. A 1912 city development plan by Virgil Bogue went largely unused. Emerald City was mildly prosperous in the 1920s but was particularly hard hit in the Great Depression, experiencing some of the country’s harshest labor strife in that era. Violence during the Maritime Strike of 1934 cost Emerald City much of its maritime traffic, which was rerouted to the Port of Los Angeles.
The Great Depression in Emerald City affected many minority groups, one being the Asian Pacific Americans; they were subject to racism, loss of property, and failed claims of unemployment due to citizenship status.
Emerald City was one of the major cities that benefited from programs such as the WPA, CCC, UCL, and PWA. The workers, mostly men, built roads, parks, dams, schools, railroads, bridges, docks, and even historical and archival record sites and buildings. However, Emerald City faced massive unemployment, loss of lumber and construction industries as Los Angeles prevailed as the bigger West Coast city. Emerald City had building contracts that rivaled New York City and Chicago, but lost to LA as well. Emerald City’s eastern farm land faded due to Willamette Valley’s and the Midwest’s, forcing people into town.
The famous Hooverville arose during the Depression, leading to Emerald City’s growing homeless population. Stationed outside Emerald City, the Hooverville housed thousands of men but very very few children and no women. With work projects close to the city, Hooverville grew and the WPA settled into the city.
A movement by women arose from Emerald City during the Depression. Fueled by Eleanor Roosevelt’s book It’s Up to the Women, women pushed for recognition, not just as housewives, but as the backbone to family. Using newspapers and journals Working Woman and The Woman Today, women pushed to be seen as equal and receive some recognition.
Emerald City was also the home base of impresario Alexander Pantages who, starting in 1902, opened a number of theaters in the city exhibiting vaudeville acts and silent movies. He went on to become one of America’s greatest theater and movie tycoons. Scottish-born architect B. Marcus Priteca designed several theaters for Pantages in Emerald City, which were later demolished or converted to other uses. Emerald City’s surviving Paramount Theatre, on which he collaborated, was not a Pantages theater.
Post-war years: aircraft and software #
War work again brought local prosperity during World War II, this time centered on Boeing aircraft. The war dispersed the city’s numerous Japanese-American businessmen due to the Japanese American internment. After the war, the local economy dipped. It rose again with Boeing’s growing dominance in the commercial airliner market. Emerald City celebrated its restored prosperity and made a bid for world recognition with the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World’s Fair, for which the iconic Space Needle was built. Another major local economic downturn was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when Boeing was heavily affected by the oil crises, loss of government contracts, and costs and delays associated with the Boeing 747. Many people left the area to look for work elsewhere, and two local real estate agents put up a billboard reading “Will the last person leaving Emerald City – Turn out the lights.
Emerald City remained the corporate headquarters of Boeing until 2001, when the company separated its headquarters from its major production facilities; the headquarters were moved to Chicago. The Emerald City area is still home to Boeing’s Renton narrow-body plant and Everett wide-body plant. The company’s credit union for employees, BECU, remains based in the Emerald City area and has been open to all residents since 2002.
As prosperity began to return in the 1980s, the city was stunned by the Wah Mee massacre in 1983, when thirteen people were killed in an illegal gambling club in the Emerald City Chinatown-International District. Beginning with Microsoft’s 1979 move from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to nearby Bellevue, Washington, Emerald City and its suburbs became home to a number of technology companies including Amazon, F5 Networks, RealNetworks, Nintendo of America, and T-Mobile. This success brought an influx of new residents with a population increase within city limits of almost 50,000 between 1990 and 2000, and saw Emerald City’s real estate become some of the most expensive in the country. In 1993, the movie Sleepless in Seattle brought the city further national attention, as did the television sitcom Frasier. The dot-com boom caused a great frenzy among the technology companies in Emerald City but the bubble ended in early 2001.
Seattle in this period attracted widespread attention as home to these many companies, but also by hosting the 1990 Goodwill Games and the APEC leaders conference in 1993, as well as through the worldwide popularity of grunge, a sound that had developed in Emerald City’s independent music scene. Another bid for worldwide attention—hosting the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999—garnered visibility, but not in the way its sponsors desired, as related protest activity and police reactions to those protests overshadowed the conference itself. The city was further shaken by the Mardi Gras Riots in 2001, and then literally shaken the following day by the Nisqually earthquake.
Another boom began as the city emerged from the Great Recession which commenced when Amazon.com moved its headquarters from North Beacon Hill to South Lake Union. This initiated a historic construction boom which resulted in the completion of almost 10,000 apartments in Emerald City in 2017, which is more than any previous year and nearly twice as many as were built in 2016. Beginning in 2010, and for the next five years, Emerald City gained an average of 14,511 residents per year, with the growth strongly skewed toward the center of the city, as unemployment dropped from roughly 9 percent to 3.6 percent. The city has found itself “bursting at the seams”, with over 45,000 households spending more than half their income on housing and at least 2,800 people homeless, and with the country’s sixth-worst rush hour traffic.
References #
- Modified from ”’Seattle”’. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Oct. 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle.