Facts about Seattle

From January to September 1907, Seattle nearly doubled its land area by annexing six incorporated towns and areas of unincorporated King County, including Southeast Seattle, Ravenna, South Park, Columbia, Ballard, and West Seattle.

Seattle's professional sports history began at the start of the twentieth century with the PCHA's Seattle Metropolitans, which in 1917 became the first American hockey team to win the Stanley Cup.

In 2006, the new Qwest Field (Seattle Seahawks Stadium) hosted the 2005-06 NFC Championship.

The most prominent weeklies are the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger, both of which consider themselves "alternative" papers.

Seattle also boasts a strong history in collegiate sports, the NCAA Division I school University of Washington and the NCAA Division II schools Seattle Pacific University and Seattle University.

Seattle is also home to a large number of publications about the environment and sustainability, including both Worldchanging and Grist.org, the nation's two largest online green magazines.

Due to Seattle's natural boundaries of mountains and water, construction of its roadway system has been limited.

Inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal and indie rock, the early grunge movement coalesced around Seattle independent record label Sub Pop.

Seattle was the major point of departure during World War II for troops heading to the North Pacific, and Boeing manufactured many of the war's bombers.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the flowering of a new generation of Paraguayan novelists and poets such as Josй Ricardo Mazу, Roque Vallejos, and Nobel Prize nominee Augusto Roa Bastos.

On July 14, 1897, the S.S. Portland docked with its famed "ton of gold," and Seattle became the main transport and supply point for those heading north.

The Moore Theatre has been a performing arts venue in Downtown Seattle since its construction in 1907.

Seattle was home of artist Jacob Lawrence from 1970 until his death in 2000.

Seattle was listed as the most literate of the country's sixty-nine largest cities in 2005 and 2006 and second most literate in 2007 in a study conducted by Central Connecticut State University.

Being so much younger than the cities of Europe and the Eastern United States, Seattle has a lower profile in terms of art museums than it does in the performing arts.

The Major League Baseball All-Star game was held in Seattle twice, first at the Kingdome in 1979 and again at Safeco Field in 2001.

The fairgrounds surrounding the Needle have been converted into Seattle Center, which remains the site of many local civic and cultural events.

Grunge, also referred to as the Seattle Sound, is a subgenre of alternative rock that was created in the mid-1980s.

Seattle Public Schools desegregated without a court order but continue to struggle to achieve racial balance in a somewhat ethnically divided city (the south part of town having more ethnic minorities than the north).

One of the key events in this respect was the Seattle Opera's ambitious and successful staging, under its founding general director Glynn Ross, of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.

David Swinson ("Doc") Maynard, one of the village's founders, was the primary advocate for renaming the village to "Seattle" after Chief Sealth.

Their settlements were eventually annexed by the city of Seattle in the early 1900s.

The Seattle Sounders currently play in the United Soccer League, but will be replaced by Seattle Sounders FC, which will play in Major League Soccer in 2009.

No mention of Seattle culture would be complete without the topic of Grunge music, which had its birth in the city.

Performed in its entirety every summer from 1975 through 1983 back-to-back cycles (first in German, then in English, by 1982, the New York Times reported that Seattle had become a serious rival to Bayreuth.

Prior to moving its headquarters to Chicago, aerospace manufacturer Boeing (#26) was the largest company based in Seattle.

What makes it seem so wet in Seattle is the seemingly perennial cloudiness, which between October and May exists six out of seven days.

The Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet, are comparably distinguished.

Three years later the town of Georgetown merged with Seattle.

Seattle has well over 100 commercial art galleries, at least a dozen non-profit art galleries, and perhaps a hundred artists' studios that are open to the public at least once a month.

Seattle's Wagner festival has continued to the present day, albeit no longer quite such an ambitious annual event.

Seattle was the site of the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, and the attendant demonstrations by anti-globalization activists.

Wat Lao Dhammacetiyaram (Buddhist Temple) between Seattle's Rainier Beach and Rainier Valley neighborhoods.

Seattle's two major daily newspapers—the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer—share their advertising, circulation, and business departments under a Joint Operating Agreement.

Seattle has been the birthplace of a variety of institutions that have added to its identity - Microsoft, Starbucks, and Grunge music, among others.

The NBA-backed Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) began in 1996.

Seattle was once home to the Kalakala, a streamlined art deco-style ferry that plied the waters from the 1930s to the 1960s.

In 2001, TIME magazine selected Seattle Central Community College as best college of the year, stating the school "pushes diverse students to work together in small teams.

The boom lasted well into the early part of the twentieth century and funded many new Seattle companies and products.

Other Seattle companies founded during this period include Nordstrom and Eddie Bauer.

Seattle is home to one of the United States' most respected public research universities, the University of Washington.

Sky Church at Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington.

The National Register of Historic Places has over one hundred and fifty Seattle listings.

Today Seattle has teams in nearly every major professional sport.

In 2005, Men's Fitness magazine named Seattle the fittest city in the United States, citing its avoidance of fast-food along with high rates of exercise as contributing factors.

The town of South Seattle was annexed in October 1905.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced a desire to spark a new economic boom driven by the biotechnology industry in 2006.

Seattle is also well served by television and radio, with all major U.S. networks represented, along with at least five other English language stations and two Spanish language stations.

The area that is now Seattle has been inhabited since the end of the last glacial period (c. 8,000 B.C.E.—10,000 years ago).

The land upon which Seattle sits has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years, but European settlement began only in the mid-19th century.

The Seattle Center Monorail was also constructed for Century 21 and continues to run from Seattle Center to Westlake Center, a Downtown shopping mall, a little over a mile to the southeast.

State Route 522 connects Seattle to its northeastern suburbs.

Seattle's cool mild climate allows outdoor recreation including walking, cycling, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, boating, team sports, and swimming.

Seattle cable viewers also receive CBUT 2 (CBC) from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Statue of Seattle-native, Jimi Hendrix, in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Seattle has a history of boom and bust cycles, common in cities of its size.

Finance company Washington Mutual was founded in 1889, in an attempt to save Seattle's economy after the Great Seattle fire.

Seattle remained the corporate headquarters of Boeing until 2001, when the company announced a desire to separate its headquarters from its major production facilities.

Statues and pictures of this deity are differentiated into male and female halves along the central vertical axis, the male half bearing traits of Shiva and the female half those of Parvati.

Starbucks Center, the company's current headquarters, is the largest building in Seattle by volume at just over 2,000,000 square feet (186,000 mІ).

A settlement was established approximately 75 miles south of what was to become Seattle.

Other notable Seattle landmarks include Pike Place Market, the Fremont Troll, the Experience Music Project (at Seattle Center), and the Seattle Central Library.

Religious practice in Seattle reflects its rich and diverse cultural traditions.

The Seattle Thunderbirds are a major-junior hockey team that plays in the one of the Canadian major-junior hockey leagues, the WHL (Western Hockey League).

Seattle, although a relatively new city, is a significant center for the performing arts.

The Space Needle, dating from the Century 21 Exposition in 1962, is Seattle's most recognizable landmark, having been featured in numerous movies and television shows.

Nearly 200 cruise ship visits brought an estimated 750,000 passengers to Seattle in 2007.

The century-old Seattle Symphony Orchestra is among the world's most recorded orchestras.

Other Fortune 500 companies popularly associated with Seattle are based in nearby Puget Sound cities.

Traveling through Seattle, it’s hard to find an area that has nothing to recommend it.

Seattle is also served by three Amtrak routes at King Street Station: the Cascades, the Coast Starlight, and the Empire Builder.

Seattle is a coastal port city and the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

Like Rome, the city is said to lie on seven hills; the lists vary, but typically include Capitol Hill, First Hill, West Seattle, Beacon Hill, Queen Anne, Magnolia, and the former Denny Hill.