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The City

The downtown core of SEATTLE would be a predictable collection of tall office blocks and department stores were it not for two enclaves of color and character: Pike Place Market, a busy, crowded morass of stalls and cafés, and Pioneer Square, a small old-town area of restored redbrick, lined with taverns. The fabulous views over Elliott Bay, too, help to lighten the feel - best perused from along the waterfront, despite its clutter of tourist shops.

From downtown, you can ride the monorail north to the Seattle Center, where the futuristic, flying-saucer-topped tower of the Space Needle presides over an assortment of theaters, museums and the opera house. To the south, the distinctive concrete bulk of the Kingdome sports arena/concert hall maroons the small Southeast Asian-dominated International District behind its stretch of parking lots. Further south still, the huge Museum of Flight charts the development of air travel from Icarus on.

A couple of outlying districts tend to be livelier than downtown: Capitol Hill has cafés and bars which form the heart of the city's gay scene (and holds some of the best city parks); and the University District is, as you'd expect, a students' district of cheap cafés with some uptempo nightlife.

Pike Place Market and the Waterfront
Seattle Art Museum
Pioneer Square and around
Chinatown/International District
The Museum of Flight
Southwest to Alki Beach
The Seattle Center
Capitol Hill
The University District
Lake Washington Canal, Ballard and other northern parts of town
Lake Washington and the eastern outskirts

Pike Place Market and the Waterfront

Pike Place Market, at the bottom of Pike Street, is rightly downtown Seattle's biggest attraction. Buskers and street entertainers play to busy crowds, smells of coffee drift from the cafés, and stalls are piled high with lobsters, crabs, salmon, vegetables and fruit. Further into the long market building, craft stalls sell handmade jewellery, woodcarvings and silk-screen printing, while small shops stock a massive range of ethnic foods.

Farmers first brought their produce here in 1907, lowering food prices by selling straight from the barrow. The market boomed in the poverty-stricken years of the Depression, but by the Sixties it had become shabby and neglected, and the authorities decided to flatten the area altogether. Architect Victor Steinbrueck led a horrified protest: he wanted to preserve the turn-of-the-century buildings, and, more importantly, the whole character of the market as a source of affordable provisions for the elderly and the poor. There was a period of confrontation between the two lobbies, but in 1971 Seattlites voted overwhelmingly to keep the market. Now restored, it still provides low-priced food, thereby preserving its roots - though, perhaps inevitably, upscale restaurants catering to tourists and local yuppies are fast creeping in, undeterred by the surrounding area's porno theaters and teenage prostitutes.

Stairs in the market lead down to the Hillclimb, which descends past more shops and cafés to the Waterfront. The harbor's no longer deep enough for modern ocean-going ships, and much of the old waterfront has been turned over to the tourist trade while the port's real business goes on to the north and south. Almost opposite the Hillclimb, Pier 59 is one of a line of old wooden jetties which once served the tall ships; it now houses Seattle's Aquarium (daily summer 10am-7pm, winter 10am-5pm; $6.50), which provides some lively information on marine life in the Sound, an underwater viewing dome and a pool of playful sea otters and seals. A combined ticket (for $10.80) also admits you to Omnidome next door (daily 10am-8.30pm; $5.95 for two films), showing films featuring clever graphics, or natural dramas such as the eruption of Mount St Helens.

South of Pier 59, the waterfront is lined with souvenir shops, restaurants and fish and chips stands, the most famous of which - though it has declined since the death of owner-founder Ivar Haglund - Ivar's Acres of Clams, comes complete with its own special stop ("Clam Central Station") on the waterfront streetcar (85cents), which carries tourists along the bay in restored vintage carriages. The waterfront gets back to business at Pier 52, where Colman Dock is the terminal for the Washington State Ferries (see "Listings" for ferry information), and a good place to watch them pull in and out - though it can get somewhat frantic in the rush hour with commuters crossing from suburban homes over the bay.

Seattle Art Museum

100 University St. Tues, Wed, Fri & Sat 10am-5pm, Thurs 10am-9pm, Sun noon-5pm. $5.

Close to Pike Place Market down along First Avenue, the gleamingly new Seattle Art Museum was completed in 1991 to a design by Robert Venturi. The Philadelphian architect took his commission seriously: he wanted to create a museum which was "popular yet esoteric, closed but open, [and] monumental yet inviting". To effect his purpose, Venturi's limestone- and terracotta-faced building has a 48-foot Hammering Man sculpture plonked outside the front door as a "tribute to the working man".

Inside the four-story building, a grand staircase leads from the lobby to the upper galleries, under the watchful eye of Chinese sculptures of camels, rams and guards. The second level is given over to temporary exhibitions and the third - and most diverting - boasts an eclectic collection of African, Asian, Oceanian, Levantine and Native American pieces: among many, there are extraordinary masks and fetishes from Guinea and Congo, and, from the Pacific Northwest, rattles and clappers, gargoyle-like wooden pipes, canoes, prow ornaments, more dancing masks and several enormous totem poles from British Columbia. The fourth floor traces the development of "Art in Europe and the United States", beginning with a handful of ancient Mediterranean artefacts, but the modern stuff is more eye-catching, mostly in its awfulness and/or inaccessibility. Look out for the elemental Coloured Shouting of Gilbert and George with a script that reads "The decadent artists stand for themselves and their chosen few. . . a crude denial of the life of the people".

Pioneer Square and around

Walk a few blocks inland from the ferry terminal and you come to Pioneer Square (actually an area of a few blocks focusing on First Avenue and Yesler Way) - Seattle's oldest section and another spot that had a close brush with the demolition balls of the Sixties. The restoration work is more glossy here than at Pike Place Market, and the square's old red brick, black wrought iron and heavy stonework bear the unmistakable hallmark of a well-tended historic district, with bookstores and galleries adding a veneer of sophistication. Rock music resounds from a group of lively taverns at night, but by day there's little evidence of the more rumbustious aspects of the city's past. It was here in the mid-1800s that Henry Yesler erected the Puget Sound's first steam-powered sawmill, felling trees at the top of a nearby hill and rolling the logs down what's now Yesler Way, and was then known as the "skid road". Drunks and down-and-outs gathered here in the later years of the Depression and the term "skid row" passed into its present usage - or at least that's Seattle's version.

The whole district was razed in 1889 when a pot of boiling glue turned over in a cabinetmaker's shop and set the wooden buildings and streets ablaze. Rebuilding, the city resolved an unsavory problem with the sewage system (which had a nasty habit of flowing in reverse when the tide was high in the bay) by regrading the level of the land, with the result that entrances to the surviving brick buildings now came in at the old first-floor level. The ground floors, now below the earth, connected by underground passages, became a literal underworld that was soon a prime location for illicit activities (such as drinking during Prohibition). These passages were reopened in the Sixties, and can be explored on the 90-minute Underground Tours which leave more or less once an hour (late morning to mid-afternoon) from Doc Maynard's tavern, 610 First Ave (682-4646 for times and reservations; $5.50) - by far the most amusing way to find out about Seattle's seamy past, with witty guides taking an offbeat look at the city's history before leading you underground.

A couple of blocks from Doc Maynard's, at 117 South Main St, the Klondike Gold Rush National Park (daily 9am-5pm; free) is not a park at all, but a small museum where a free film and a few artefacts portray the 1897 rush which followed the discovery of gold in the Klondike region of Canada. As soon as the first ship carrying Klondike gold docked in the city, Seattle's sharp-eyed capitalists espied massive trading potential in selling groceries, clothing, sledges and even ships to the gold-seekers, and launched a formidable publicity campaign, bombarding inland cities with propaganda billing Seattle above all other ports as the gateway to Yukon gold. It worked: prospectors streamed in, merchants (and con-men) scented easy profit, the population escalated and traders made a fortune. The dog population fared less well, as many a hapless mutt was harnessed to a sledge while gold-seekers practised "mushing" up and down Seattle's streets before facing Yukon snow. Jack London's novel The Call of the Wild puts the canine point of view, and gold fever is gloriously sent up in the Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush - shown free at the museum on weekend afternoons.

Almost opposite the museum, the large cobblestoned square of Occidental Park - with its off-putting groups of the drunk and destitute - displays four recently erected totem poles carved with the grotesque, almost cruel, features of creatures from Northwest Native American legends.

The business district
At the corner of Yesler Way and Second Ave, Seattle's first skyscraper, the white terracotta-trimmed Smith Tower, edges the city's financial district. Built in 1914 by the New York typewriter mogul, L C Smith, the tower was, for years, the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Today it mostly holds private offices, but if you're passing it's worth looking in on the elegant lobby, decked out with marble and carved Indian heads. Restored brass-lined elevators serve an observation deck at the top, although it's often closed to the public. To the north, the prestigious new glassy office blocks of the business district loom over the Smith Tower - not on the whole an inviting sight, although the Rainier Tower, balanced on a narrow pedestal at Fourth Ave and University, and the dark, 76-story Columbia Center, at Fourth Ave and Columbia, the tallest of the towers (and aptly nicknamed the "Darth Vader building" or "the box the Space Needle came in"), have passing interest as engineering feats.

Chinatown/International District

A few blocks south of Pioneer Square, your way is blocked by the huge concrete Kingdome, Seattle's main sports and concerts arena, and the home of its Seahawks football team and Mariners baseball team. The Kingdome's spread of parking lots seems to signal an end to the downtown area, but pushing on east up S Jackson St, past the redbrick clocktower of the old railway station, the concrete expanses soon give way to the build-up of restaurants and ethnic grocers of Seattle's Chinatown - officially (and blandly) labelled the International District due to the presence of other far-eastern groups. Aside from some good restaurants, for a city with a strong history of Southeast Asian immigration it's a rundown and rather scrappy neighborhood, its tawdry blocks dotted with streetpeople and few actual sights.

Seattle's Chinatown hasn't always been desolate. In the nineteenth century this was an overcrowded and unruly district, its boarding houses crammed with young Chinese men who'd come over to earn money in the city's mills and canneries. Suspicion of the area's gambling halls and opium dens overflowed into racial hatred during a depression in the 1880s: federal laws debarred the Chinese from full citizenship and in the Northwest, Chinese workers were attacked and threatened, their homes burned. The Seattle authorities did eventually rake up an armed guard which made a belated and botched attempt to prevent mobs expelling the entire community (as happened in Tacoma), but most Chinese left anyway, leaving behind a depleted and scarred population. Later influxes of Japanese, Filipino, Korean and Thai immigrants, and more recently Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian newcomers, went some way to restoring a trace of the district's nineteenth-century vigor, but Chinatown has been regarded locally with some trepidation - partly due to increasing gang activity. In reality the area is more shabby than unsafe, though it is best to take care after dark. The focus of the district, insofar as it has one, is Hing Hay Park at Maynard and South King St, where an ornate oriental gateway stands beneath a large and rather faded dragon mural. But there's not really anything else to see beyond the absorbing little Wing Luke Asian Museum at 407 Seventh Ave and Jackson St (Tues-Fri 11am-4.30pm, Sat & Sun noon-4pm, closed Mon; $2.50, free Thurs), which goes some way to explaining local Asian-American history, with reference to the career of Wing Luke, the first Chinese-American to be elected to public office in Seattle, in 1962.

The Museum of Flight

9404 E Marginal Way. Daily 10am-5pm, until 9pm Thurs; $5.

The best and biggest of Seattle's museums, the Museum of Flight more than makes up for the twenty-minute bus ride (#174) south from downtown through the port's dreary industrial hinterland. As the birthplace of the Boeing company, Seattle has its own stake in aviation history, and has invested heavily in this huge museum, partly housed in the 1909 "Red Barn" that was Boeing's original manufacturing plant. The displays, accompanied by detailed information plaques and three separate filmshows, take in everything from the dreams of the ancients, through the work of the Wright brothers, with a working model of the wind-tunnel they used, to the growth of Boeing itself, with part of the Red Barn laid out as an early designer's workshop. The best bit of the museum is the huge glass-and-steel Great Gallery, big as a football field and hung with twenty full-sized aircraft - tiny, fragile-looking mail planes and a red sportscar that can apparently be given wings in minutes. There's also a replica of the Mercury space capsule that took John Glenn into space in 1962. Behind the gallery, museum staff hand out eggboxes and plasticine for the construction of model planes - one way to learn aerodynamics.

Southwest to Alki Beach

Southwest of downtown, on the other side of Elliott Bay (take bus #37 from downtown), the flat little peninsula of Alki Point is where Seattle's founders first tried to settle when they weighed anchor in the Puget Sound, optimistically christening their community "New York Alki" - New York "by and by" in the Chinook language. Defeated by floods and the lack of space, the town soon shifted over to what's now Pioneer Square, changing its name to Seattle after a friendly neighborhood chief. The peninsula's now a residential district, interesting only if you want to join the promenaders and cyclists along the narrow strip of Alki Beach, which offers pleasing views of Elliott Bay with the city skyline behind and the Olympic Mountains to the west. You can swim here too, but the water's pretty cold.

The Seattle Center

As you head north from Pike Place Market, downtown peters out around Virginia Street, beyond which lies a district once occupied by Denny Hill and now flattened into the Denny Regrade. Considering the momentous effort that went into knocking the hill down, it's a shame that nothing interesting has been built here - though the area around Bell Street, known as Belltown, has some character, its tough taverns now rubbing shoulders with upmarket cafés with French names. This apart, the regrade is probably best viewed from the window of the monorail, which runs from the Westlake Shopping Mall at Fifth Ave and Pine St downtown (80cents one way), crosses the area on concrete supports, and ends up inside the Seattle Center.

The Seattle Center is an inheritance from the 1962 World's Fair, whose theme was "Century 21" (hence the idea of the spindly Space Needle tower, the fair's - and now Seattle's - adopted symbol). Since then the site of the fair has become a sort of culture-park, collecting the city's symphony, ballet and opera, a couple of theaters and a museum alongside the Space Needle, and a small amusement park.

The monorail drops you close to the Space Needle (observation deck daily summer 8am-midnight, winter 9am-midnight; $6). Though reminiscent of the Star Trek era of space-fascination, this still exudes a fair amount of glamor, especially at night, when it's lit up and Seattle's well-to-do come to eat at its revolving restaurant. The view from the observation deck, where there's a (pricey) bar, is unmatched, and this is much the best place to get an overall orientation of the city and its surroundings.

Center House is next to the terminal also, an unappetizingly dark mall-like building, and the unlikely home of the first-rate Seattle Children's Museum as well as The Group, the city's leading multicultural theater group. Close by, the excellent Pacific Science Center (summer daily 10am-6pm; rest of year Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-6pm; $5.50), is easily recognizable by its distinctive white arches. This is much livelier than it sounds, full of bright, innovative and often noisy exhibits on a huge range of science-based topics, from robotic and submarine technology to a model of the Puget Sound area, exploring its ebbs and tides; there's a planetarium and an IMAX theater inside here too.

Capitol Hill

Of all Seattle's neighborhoods, Capitol Hill, a fifteen-minute bus-ride east of downtown, has probably raised the most eyebrows over the years. Since young gays, hippies and assorted radicals moved in over the Sixties and Seventies, this has been the city's closest thing to an alternative center, fulcrum of the arts scene and chancier night-time activities. In fact, the shops and cafés around Broadway, the main street, are now pretty mainstream and, despite black leather jackets slung over teenage shoulders, the neighborhood's days at the cutting edge of Seattle Bohemia are probably over. Still, the concentration of easy-going restaurants, coffee houses and bars provides good day-time café-sitting and night-time drinking (see "Eating" and "Nightlife"), and if you're gay this is still very much the place to be - though homophobic violence can happen here as disturbingly often as it does anywhere in the US.

The northern end of the Capitol Hill district is, by contrast, quietly wealthy, mansions built on Gold Rush fortunes and trimmed with immaculate lawns sitting sedately around the shrubs and trees of Volunteer Park, named in honor of those who volunteered for the Spanish-American War of 1898. The lovely 1912 glass Conservatory here (daily summer 10am-7pm, winter 10am-4pm; free) packs an immediate aesthetic punch: divided into galleries simulating different climates (jungle, desert, rainforest, etc), it has a sweltering mix of perfect flowers and shrubs, and a huge collection of orchids. Also in the park, the old Water Tower can be climbed for a grand (and free) panorama across Seattle, albeit through wire mesh.

Ten blocks east of Volunteer Park, Washington Park stretches away to the north, encompassing the University of Washington Arboretum, whose assortment of trees shades footpaths and cycle tracks - a huge, leafy invitation for summer walks and picnics, and especially beautiful in fall when the trees turn brilliant shades of red and gold. At the south end of the park, is the immaculately designed Japanese Tea Gardens (March-Nov daily 10am to around dusk; $1.50), a landscape of neat ornamental lakes and flower-strewn banks.

The University District

Across Union Bay from the park, the University District (aka the "U" district) is livelier than Capitol Hill: a busy hotchpotch of coffee houses, cinemas, clothes, book and record shops, all catering to the tastes and budgets of the University of Washington's 35,000 students. The area centers on University Way, known as "The Ave" and lined with cheap ethnic restaurants plus the cavernous University Bookstore - an excellent place to get the lowdown on the student scene.

The sprawling campus itself is more serene, its sedate nineteenth-century buildings and landscaped grounds overlooking Union Bay. There are a couple of museums here: the pale brick Henry Art Gallery, at NE 15th Ave and NE 41st St (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm, until 9pm Thurs; $3), houses American and European paintings from the last two centuries, and mounts small innovative shows, often drawing on local work. The Thomas Burke Memorial Museum, on the northwestern corner of the campus at 17th Ave and NE 45th St (daily 10am-5pm, until 10pm Thurs; $3), has carved totem poles, painted wooden masks from the Northwest coast, plaited-fiber fans from Polynesia and sorcery charms from New Guinea. Across Montlake Bridge, back on the other side of Lake Union, the Museum of History and Industry, at 2700 24th Ave East and East Shelby (daily 10am-5pm; $3), has a gallery reconstructing Seattle in the 1880s, with homes, storefronts and a free film, though this is rather out on a limb (bus #25 from downtown drops you fairly near) - enthusiasts only.

Lake Washington Canal, Ballard and other northern parts of

town The U district and Seattle's other northern neighborhoods - working west, Fremont/Wallingford, Green Lake/Greenwood and Ballard - are sliced off from the rest of town by water. Lake Union, in the middle, is connected to the larger Lake Washington to the east, and the sea to the west by the eight-mile-long Lake Washington Ship Canal. Built at the turn of the century to carry ships to safe harbors on the inland lakes, the canal was used during World War I to safeguard battleships from exposure to attack in the more open Elliott Bay. If you have an hour to spare, the procession of boats passing from salt water to fresh through a set of canal locks called the Hiram M Chittenden Locks, near the mouth of the canal, makes pleasant viewing (bus #17 from downtown), and migrating salmon bypass the locks via the fish ladder, a sort of piscine staircase laid out with viewing windows. In peak migrating season (late summer for salmon, fall and early winter for trout) the water behind the locks is full of huge, jumping fish.

East of the locks is Salmon Bay, on the south side of which, beside NW 15th Avenue's Ballard Bridge, is Fisherman's Terminal, crowded with the boats of Seattle's fishing fleet; you can buy freshly caught fish here. On the northern side of Salmon Bay, Ballard (reachable by several buses from downtown) was settled by Scandinavian fishermen. The Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 NW 67th St (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun noon-4pm; $3), outlines their history from poverty in rural Scandinavia, through immigration problems at Ellis Island and New York tenements to arrival in the West, in a series of rather musty tableaux in the basement of an old school. Bar a couple of nightspots (see p.161), there's little else to see here, though if you do find yourself passing further east, along the northern shore of Lake Union, look out for Gasworks Park, at N Northlake Way and Wallingford, where the rusting black towers of an old gasworks have been left as "urban sculpture" and the slag heaps grassed over to make kite-flying mounds; on summer evenings skateboarders bring ghetto-blasters, and their music echoes round the old industrial site. The park sticks out into the middle of Lake Union at the foot of the Fremont/Wallingford district, a largely white and comparatively prosperous neighborhood that extends north (on the west side of I-5) into the quiet residential streets of Green Lake/Greenwood. Here, at 5500 N Phinney Ave and N 55th St, you'll find the Woodland Park Zoo (daily summer 9.30am-6pm, winter 9.30am-4pm; $3; bus #5 from First Ave and Union St), an open zoo with naturalish habitats for the animals and, oddly enough, a memorial rock in the African savanna area paying tribute to Jimi Hendrix, local lad made world-famous rock guitarist. Hwy-99 separates the zoo from the rest of Woodland Park, which extends northeast around Green Lake, a popular haunt for local joggers.

Lake Washington and the eastern outskirts

Until it was bridged, Lake Washington isolated the city from the countryside and small farms to the east. Ferries laden with farm produce made slow progress across the water, and the lake became a sort of tradesmen's entrance to the city while the center of Seattle looked towards the big commercial ships docking in Elliott Bay. All this changed when two long, floating bridges, one built in the Forties, the second in the Sixties, opened up commuting possibilities: business people poured across, tripling the population of one-time rural towns Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond and turning them into affluent city suburbs. Redmond became the world headquarters of software giants Microsoft; Kirkland built plush leisure facilities along its waterfront; and Bellevue quickly outgrew its suburban status to become the state's fourth largest city with its own smart business district and shopping area, the showpiece of which is the expensively stocked Bellevue Square Mall. Malls and lake views aside, these three towns have little to recommend them, though neighboring Mercer Island, in the middle of Lake Washington, is a pleasant, leafy interlude just a few minutes' drive from downtown along I-90.

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