SEATTLE: INSIDE OUT
As Cathay Pacific’s new route launches, Seattle insider KATE APPLETON compares views with first-time visitor LOTTE JEFFS
Inormally associate trips to the US with the glamour of Los Angeles and New York. There it’s all power- dressing, firm handshakes, guest lists and complicated cocktails. These cities are exhaustingly ‘on’ and I’ll often leave feeling depleted.
So last time I was in LA, I decided to bookend a work trip with a four-night wind down in Seattle, where an off- duty, outdoorsy lifestyle and quirky counterculture vibe would send me home energised for a change.
The city certainly delivered: stimulating as a venti Americano, which is no surprise given that it is, of course, the home of Starbucks. I stayed downtown at the
Ace Hotel – warm and welcoming if somewhat no frills (I booked a room with an ensuite bathroom, though most have shared facilities). Dropping my five-star pretensions felt the right way to do Seattle, which is like New York’s bohemian East Village and LA’s hippie beach town Venice before Instagram turned these pockets of authenticity into Valenciafiltered pastiches of themselves. There’s a rawness and unpretentious edge that I found entirely convincing.
The Ace is a few blocks from Seattle’s landmark Pike Place Market, which runs adjacent to the water and offers some scenic vantage points over Elliot Bay. The country’s oldest farmers’ market is a great place for a quick meal, or to watch the Seattle tradition of fish throwing, where your fresh salmon is chucked from the ice to the fishmonger.
Such historic practices feel quaint compared to the city’s current status as a burgeoning technopolis, home to Microsoft, countless start-ups and Amazon’s sprawling downtown HQ complete with The Spheres – three plantfilled glass pods functioning as indoor gardens- cum- offices. Visitors can enjoy a guided tour of these offices, if you can call them that, which house more than 400 different species of cloud forest plants from all over the world.
Many tech billionaires, including Bill and Melinda Gates, live in nearby Medina which is connected to Seattle by bridge – their combined worth reaching into the tens of billions of dollars and their impact on the local economy felt throughout the city.
Seattle was originally a frontier town, settled in 1851 (though Native American tribes had lived there much longer) and it became the forefront of the lumber industry. The University of Washington describes the idea of a ‘ frontier’ as
‘an edge between the known and the unknown, the settled and the wild… a frontier is where you are on your own, where the rules are not yet made.’ This frontier spirit certainly survives in the city, from the innovative Space Needle built for the 1962 World’s Fair to the establishment of the Boeing factory in 1966 and its pivotal role in the space race, through to today where the chilled out, legal pot-smoking vibe ( Washington became the first US state to legalise recreational use of marijuana) belies frenetic advancements in tech.
Visit the clutch of Amazon Go shops where your groceries are automatically charged to your Amazon account – no cash desks needed – for a vision of the future of retail.
In 1869, a fire ravaged the city, burning much of it to the ground – the entire business district was destroyed and new infrastructure was built on top. As a result,
there’s a great subterranean tour that leads you through entombed streets and shopfronts ( undergroundtour.com). I wonder if in another few hundred years, after an equivalently catastrophic digital crash, tourists will be taken through the abandoned Amazon office complex in the same way.
But it’s hard to be dystopian when Seattle is just so upbeat. Not in an annoying or fake Hollywood way though, but in a pinball and picklebacks at 4pm on a Thursday kind of way. The pinball museum is the most fun you can have – as an adult or child; try your thumbs at retro games like Buckaroo. And a pickleback, for the uninitiated, is a shot of whiskey and a shot of pickle brine. Delicious? Who cares!
Every other shop in Seattle seems to cater to a rugged, adventurous life. With Mount Rainier and the Cascades close by, skiing and hiking are how locals spend their weekends. The closest I got to nature was a cycle on a Lime electric bike (download the app and pick one up wherever you spot one – there are thousands) around Olympic Sculpture Park, downtown Seattle’s largest green space, which zigzags from the pavilion to the water’s edge. There’s even a tiny rocky beach.
I didn’t have enough time to go fully offgrid and into the beautiful surrounding mountains. Instead I trekked up Capitol Hill, which was the area in which I felt most at home, with its chic, upmarket shops such as Totokaelo selling designer clothes and home accessories. I drank a beer from a mason jar – the universal symbol of hipsterism – and ate a ‘grain bowl’ (ditto) at Oddfellows cafe. I browsed Elliott Bay Book Company and had a coffee at the Neko cat cafe. Even here, you can’t forget you’re in counter- cultural Seattle: ice cream shops have window displays declaring themselves Safe Spaces – ‘all ethnicities, genders, sexualities and everyone in between are welcome’.
The city has benefited from this welcoming spirit and has been a melting pot of cultural and culinary influences, particularly from East Asia, since the 1860s, when the first immigrants arrived by steamship and rail. In Pike Place Market, Tenzing Momo is the West Coast’s oldest and largest herbal apothecary and perfumery. Seattle’s most spectacular Asian grocer, Uwajimaya, is a great place for gifts, fantastic packaged snacks or a quick meal. But it’s at the Wing Luke Museum where you get a real sense of the impact of the Asian American community, which includes martial arts actor Bruce Lee, who lived and studied here.
I can’t visit anywhere in the US without seeking out a retro diner. So before leaving I had a breakfast of veggie hash and eggs at The 5 Point Cafe. This Seattle institution is open 24 hours a day. As I drank coffee at 7:30am, alongside the techpreneurs tapping away on their laptops, the previous night’s revellers were still knocking back whisky on the other side of the bar. This rock’n’roll diner encapsulates the spirit of the city: quirky, stimulating, a little edgy and unexpected. A note on the menu reads: ‘ We welcome all types of people including those in various states of inebriation, and with sometimes extremely different political, religious and social ideologies… we are sorry if you are offended but these are our people and we love them, so love them too or leave’. How very Seattle.
SEATTLE IS JUST SO UPBEAT, IN A PINBALL AND PICKLEBACKS AT 4PM ON A THURSDAY KIND OF WAY