Lonely Planet Seattle , livre ebook

Seattle

Contents

Plan Your Trip

Welcome to Seattle
Seattle's Top 10
What's New
Need to Know
Top Itineraries
If You Like...
Month by Month
With Kids
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Sports & Activities
Shopping

Explore

Neighborhoods at a Glance
Downtown, Pike Place & Waterfront
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Pioneer Square, International District & SoDo
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Belltown & Seattle Center
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Queen Anne & Lake Union
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Capitol Hill & First Hill
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
The CD, Madrona & Madison Park
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
U District
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Green Lake & Fremont
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Ballard & Discovery Park
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Georgetown & West Seattle
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Day Trips from Seattle
Bainbridge Island
Whidbey Island
Snoqualmie Valley
Olympia
La Conner
Mt Rainier
Sleeping

Understand

Understand Seattle
Seattle Today
History
Way of Life
Music

Survive

Transportation
Arriving in Seattle
Getting Around Seattle
Tours
Directory AZ
Customs Regulations
Discount Cards
Electricity
Emergency
Internet Access
LGBTIQ Travelers
Medical Services
Money
Opening Hours
Post
Public Holidays
Taxes & Refunds
Telephone
Time
Tourist Information
Travelers with Disabilities
Visas
City Maps
Downtown, Pike Place & Waterfront
Pioneer Square, International District & SoDo
Belltown & Seattle Center
Queen Anne & Lake Union
Capitol Hill & First Hill
Central District, Madrona & Madison Park
U District
Fremont
Green Lake
Ballard & Discovery Park
Georgetown
West Seattle

Table of Contents

Behind the Scenes
Our Writers

Special Features

Music & Nightlife
Art & Culture
Only in Seattle
Seattle Outdoors
Welcome to Seattle

Blink and it’s changed: Seattle can be that ephemeral. Welcome to a city that pushes the envelope, embraces new trends and plots a path toward the future.

Local Flavor
First time in Seattle? Cut to the chase and make a beeline for its proverbial pantry: Pike Place Market. It was founded in 1907 to fortify local inhabitants with fresh Northwest produce, and its long-held mantra of ‘meet the producer’ still echoes enthusiastically around a city where every restaurateur worth their salt knows the name of their fishmonger and the biography of the cow that made yesterday’s burgers. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’ve arrived in a maelstrom of well-educated palates and wildly experimental chefs who are willing to fuse American cuisine with just about anything – as long as it’s local.

A United States of Neighborhoods
Visitors setting out to explore Seattle with a blank canvas should think of the city as a United States of Neighborhoods, or – to put it in more human terms – a family of affectionate but sometimes errant siblings. There’s the aloof, elegant one (Queen Anne), the cool, edgy one (Capitol Hill), the weird, bearded one (Fremont), the independently minded Scandinavian one (Ballard), the grizzled old grandfather (Pioneer Square) and the precocious adolescent still carving out its identity (South Lake Union). You’ll never fully understand Seattle until you’ve visited them all.

Micro-Businesses
To outsiders, Seattle is an industrious creator of macro-brands. To insiders, it’s a city of micro-businesses and boundary-pushing grassroots movements. For proof, dip into the third-wave coffee shops, the microbreweries with their casual tasting rooms, or the cozy informal bookstores that remain rock solid in a city that spawned Amazon. Then there are the latest national trends that Seattle has helped create: craft cider, pot shops, micro-distilleries, specialist pie-makers, homemade ice cream and fledgling nano-breweries. Walk the streets and scour the neighborhoods; there’s far more to this city than Starbucks' vanilla lattes and Boeing airplanes.

A Walk on the Weird Side
Just because it nurtured tech giants Microsoft and Amazon, it doesn’t mean that Seattle hasn’t got a surreal arty side. Crisscross its urban grid and you’ll find all kinds of freakish apparitions: a rocket sticking out of a shoe shop; a museum built to resemble a smashed-up electric guitar; glass orbs in wooden canoes; a statue of Vladimir Lenin; a mural made of used chewing gum; fish-tossing market traders; and a museum dedicated to antique pinball machines (which you can still play). No, you haven't over-indulged in some powerful (legal) marijuana. You’ve just worked out that Seattle is far more bohemian than beige.

Space Needle and the Seattle skyline | XUANLU WANG / SHUTTERSTOCK ©


Why I Love Seattle
By Brendan Sainsbury, Writer
My knowledge of Seattle pre-2000 can be summed up in one word: ‘grunge.’ A product of my generation, I grew up admiring the city from afar by connecting with its music, unaware of 95% of what it had to offer. A move from London (UK) to BC (Canada) in 2004 quickly changed the configuration. Regular sorties south of the 49th parallel taught me that there isn’t just one Seattle, there are at least 10 of them – mini-cities personified in neighborhoods full of shifting moods and weird subcultures that satisfied pretty much every taste I had.
Seattle's Top 10

Pike Place Market
1 Way more than just a market, 110-year-old Pike Place is a living community, a cabaret show, a way of life and an intrinsic piece of Seattle’s soul. Strolling through its clamorous, sometimes chaotic thoroughfares, you simply couldn’t be in any other city. There are fish that fly, shops that look like they’ve sprung from a Harry Potter movie, an art wall made out of chewing gum, and a multitude of classic old buskers jamming acoustic versions of AC/DC songs outside the world's oldest Starbucks. Pure magic!
1 Downtown, Pike Place & Waterfront

CREATISTA / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Seattle's Top 10

Space Needle
2 The city icon that is as synonymous with Seattle as the letters S-E-A-T-T-L-E was built for the 1962 World’s Fair, and its novel revolving restaurant and bold futuristic design have proved durable. Although it's no longer Seattle's tallest structure, one million annual visitors still squeeze into the Space Needle’s slick, speedy elevators to enjoy views that are best described as sublime. Granted, tickets are expensive and you might have to fight off the odd tourist or three, but stop complaining and get in line: this is an essential Seattle pilgrimage.
1 Belltown & Seattle Center

ELENA_SUVOROVA / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Seattle's Top 10

Museum of Pop Culture
3 Paying homage to the left-handed, guitar-burning musical genius that was Jimi Hendrix, Paul Allen’s architecturally bizarre Museum of Pop Culture is an apt memorial to a region that has been a powerful musical innovator since the days of local boy Bing Crosby. Come and see the legends and how they were created, from Hendrix to Kurt Cobain, or experiment with your own riffs in the interactive Sound Lab. Marrying Captain Kirk with Nirvana Kurt is the on-site 'Icons of Science Fiction' exhibit, where Star Trek meets Doctor Who .
1 Belltown & Seattle Center

IF VI WAS IX, BY SOUND SCULPTOR TRIMPIN; IMAGE: CHECUBUS / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Seattle's Top 10

Puget Sound Ferries
4 Tap the average Seattleite about their most cherished weekend excursion and they could surprise you with a dark horse – a cheap and simple ride on the commuter ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island . There’s nothing quite like being surrounded by water and seeing Seattle’s famous skyline disappearing in the ferry's foamy wake, the only commentary the cry of the seagulls and the only entertainment the comedic antics of escaping families bound for a day out on the Olympic Peninsula.
2 Day Trips from Seattle

ROBYNPHOTO / GETTY IMAGES ©

Seattle's Top 10

Public Art
5 Seattle likes to display its art out in the open with no holds barred. Sculptures and statues decorate parks, streets and squares, from the weird (a stone troll underneath a bridge), to the iconic (Hendrix in classic rock-and-roll pose), to the downright provocative (a statue of Vladimir Lenin). The city even has its own sculpture park , an outpost of the Seattle Art Museum that spreads its works across a beautifully landscaped outdoor space overlooking glassy Elliott Bay.
1 Belltown & Seattle Center

Olympic Sculpture Park | CHECUBUS / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Seattle's Top 10

Discovery Park
6 Seattle justifies its ‘Emerald City’ moniker in the rugged confines of 534-acre Discovery Park , a one-time military installation reborn as a textbook example of urban sustainability. Speckled with Douglas fir trees, hunting eagles, log-littered beaches and wild meadows, it resembles a lonely tract of Pacific Northwestern wilderness picked up and dropped into the middle of a crowded metropolitan area. Come here for breathing space, coexistence with nature, and a chance to slow down and reflect on the magic that lured people to Seattle in the first place.
2 Ballard & Discovery Park

ROMAN KHOMLYAK / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Seattle's Top 10

Belltown Dining
7 Belltown , the high-spirited neighborhood where flannel-shirted grunge groupies once practiced their stage-dives, is now better known for its restaurants – cramming over 100 of