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Seattle: 10 Claims to Fame

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WRITTEN BY

Adam Augustyn

Adam Augustyn is Managing Editor, Reference Content at Encyclopædia Britannica.

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© Digital Vision/Getty Images

As a metropolis with a number of prominent cultural associations,

Seattle has a tendency to be reduced to only its best-known attractions

when referred to by the mass media. However, the Emerald City is

much more than rain, Microsoft, the Space Needle, and people

throwing fish at Pike Place Market (a practice that suspiciously tends

to happen most frequently when there are television cameras around).

Here are 10 of Seattle’s claims to fame you might not have heard

about.
● Coffee
●

● coffee roasting
Coffee beans roasting.
● © AbleStock.com/Jupiterimages
● Well, OK, some obvious Seattle associations are just too good not
to mention in this list. Seattle averages 226 cloudy days per year
—the highest number for a major city in the U.S.—and the
constantly gray dreary skies lead Seattleites to perk themselves
up by consuming mass quantities of coffee. While the city is most
widely associated with Starbucks, which opened its first store
near the famed Pike Place Market in 1971, Seattle has hundreds
of additional chain and independent coffee shops as well. That
java saturation has led a number of sources to declare that the
city has the highest coffee-shop-to-person ratio in the U.S. Even
without any hard numbers to back it up, however, the city still
 has a claim as the coffee capital of the U.S. for popularizing (via
the proliferation of the Starbucks franchise) the café culture that
previously was found primarily in Europe and for making a $4
cup of hot water run over ground beans seem like a reasonable
purchase.
● Grunge
●
● Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain performing with Nirvana, 1993.
● Pictorial Press/Alamy
● Seattle exploded onto the pop-culture landscape in the early
1990s as grunge became the dominant music genre of the period.
Characterized by distorted guitars, angsty lyrics, and the
embracing of the punk-rock spirit (as well as by the bands all
coming from Seattle and environs), grunge rock was hailed upon
its arrival for being more “authentic” than the stylized hair metal
that dominated rock music in the 1980s. The movement led to
the popularization of so-called alternative rock and brought
newfound attention to many of the grunge bands’ overlooked
forebears like the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine. Although
many of the bands that reached varying levels of international
fame with the grunge explosion (particularly Nirvana, Pearl Jam,
Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Screaming Trees)
never embraced the term grunge, the word nevertheless has
maintained currency as the shorthand for the influx of influential
Seattle-based bands that made the city one of the foremost music
centers in the U.S.
● Robert Joffrey
●

● Joffrey, Robert; Arpino, Gerald

Robert Joffrey (rear) and Gerald Arpino.
● Herbert Migdoll
● Arguably the most famous name in American ballet, Robert
Joffrey was born in Seattle on Christmas Eve in 1930. He took up
tap dancing as a youth and later turned to ballet. Joffrey moved
to New York and became a dancer in various companies before
opening a ballet school in 1953 and his first small ballet company
the following year. In 1956 he founded the company that would
give him worldwide fame, the Robert Joffrey Ballet (later simply
the Joffrey Ballet). Famed for its imaginative contemporary
repertoire, the Joffrey Ballet quickly became the most notable
ballet company in the country, a reputation that persisted even
after Joffrey’s death and the relocation of the company to
Chicago.
● Amazon.com
●
● Amazon.com
Amazon.com logo.
● Amazon.com, Inc.
● With the dot-com boom of the 1990s, e-commerce sites started
doing big business, and no other e-retailer was as much of a
smash as Amazon.com. The site was incorporated in Seattle in
1994 by former hedge-fund manager Jeff Bezos, and it originally
sold only books. Over time, Amazon.com added more products to
its site and eventually found itself selling almost anything a
consumer could be looking for. While other online retailers
flamed out after the dot-com boom went bust, Amazon.com’s
diversified offerings helped it not only survive but grow into one
of the largest tech companies in existence. Today the site not
only sells almost everything under the sun, but it also has its own
e-reader and tablet (the Kindle and the Kindle Fire) and has
branched out into producing and streaming original television
shows via Amazon Prime.
● Sasquatch
●

● Sasquatch
A footprint that some claim was made by Sasquatch in Rogue Park, Ontario, Canada.
● William Brooks/Alamy
● While Sasquatch isn’t often spotted (supposedly) in Seattle
proper, the city is the largest population center near the forests
of the Cascade mountain range, which is one of the hottest spots
in the world for Sasquatch sightings (again, supposedly).
Sasquatch is purported to be a large, hairy, humanlike creature
that roams the forests of the Pacific Northwest and western
Canada. Although “Bigfoot hunters” have been scouring the
region for decades in search of the primate, no actual empirical
evidence of its existence has ever been made public. Seattle is full
of skeptical freethinkers, but the city has nevertheless come to
embrace its proximity to Sasquatch central, with the creature
popping up on a number of tourist-targeted tchotchkes sold in
the city. In addition, Seattle was one of the main settings for the
1987 Bigfoot comedy Harry and the Hendersons.
● Star-Lord (Sort Of)
●

● scene from Guardians of the Galaxy

Gamora (left; played by Zoe Saldana), Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Rocket Raccoon (voiced by
Bradley Cooper), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), and Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) from
the film Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
● Marvel Entertainment
● So technically the Marvel comic-book character Star-Lord was
born in Colorado, but the actor who portrayed him in the
blockbuster 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Pratt,
hailed from the Seattle area. He was discovered at age 19 by
actress Rae Dawn Chong while he was eking out a living as a
server to support a beach-bum lifestyle in Hawaii. He moved to
Los Angeles and was soon cast in a series of “pretty boy” roles in
television shows, but his first moderate breakout came after he
joined the sitcom Parks and Recreation in 2009 as the dumpy
and goofy Andy Dwyer. The role was beloved by comedy
devotees, but Pratt was still a relative obscurity when he was
unexpectedly cast as the leads in what would become two of the
biggest hits of 2014: The LEGO Movie and Guardians of the
Galaxy. Pratt followed by starring in Jurassic World (2015),
which cemented the Lake Stevens, Washington, product as one
of the most unlikely A-listers in Hollywood.
● Jimi Hendrix
Long before Seattle became associated with the likes of Nirvana,
Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, the city saw one of its native sons
set the music world on fire, much like one of his guitars. Jimi
Hendrix learned to play guitar while a student in Seattle, picking
up his unique technique of playing a re-strung right-handed
guitar upside-down because of the lack of left-handed guitars
available to him. He was a backup musician and struggling solo
artist before he was discovered in a New York City club and sent
to England, where he broke out as the leader of the Jimi Hendrix
Experience. From 1966 until his death from a drug overdose in
1970, he was one of the biggest and most-influential stars in rock
music, putting out a string of classic songs such as “Hey Joe,”
“Purple Haze,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Fire.” Hendrix
continued to have an impact on his hometown long after his
death, from his statue on Capitol Hill that is a popular tourist
attraction to the Experience Music Project Museum, a rock-and-
roll museum that was created by Microsoft cofounder (and
Hendrix superfan) Paul Allen in part to house his massive
collection of the rock icon’s former possessions.
● The First American Team to Win the Stanley Cup
Even though it has never been home to a National Hockey
League (NHL) team, Seattle nevertheless was the first U.S. city
with a team that won that league’s prestigious Stanley Cup.
Before the cup became the exclusive possession of the NHL, it
was awarded to the winner of an interleague series of games
between the champions of the National Hockey Association
(NHA; the forerunner of the NHL) and of the Pacific Coast
Hockey Association (PCHA) from 1914 to 1922. Following the
1916‒17 seasons for the NHA and PCHA, the former’s Montreal
Canadiens (now the most-decorated team in NHA/NHL history)
and the PCHA’s Seattle Metropolitans faced off for the Stanley
Cup. The Canadiens were the defending Stanley Cup champions
and took the first game in the best-of-five series by a dominant
8–4 score. However, the Metropolitans rallied and swept the
next three games by a combined 19–3 score to become the first
 team from the U.S. to win the arguably most famous trophy in
North American sports. The Metropolitans reached another
Stanley Cup final in 1920 (a loss to the Ottawa Senators), and the
franchise folded in 1924. While certain hockey-mad Seattleites
continue to agitate for an NHL franchise to this day, they can
nevertheless take solace in the city’s unique place in the sport’s
history.
● Teriyaki
●

● chicken teriyaki
Seattle-style takeout chicken teriyaki.
● © Adam Augustyn
● Philadelphia has cheesesteaks. Chicago has deep-dish pizza. And
Seattle has…teriyaki? Although it’s not nearly as closely
associated with its home as many other regional delicacies,
teriyaki is Seattle’s signature food. A popular cheap meal for the
city’s many college students, the Seattle version of teriyaki
combines the traditional Japanese preparation of coating a
protein with a glaze of soy mixed with a sweet wine, but the glaze
is additionally thickened and sweetened for the American palate
and also contains ginger and garlic, a variation that came from
the many Korean teriyaki-shop owners in the city. The glazed
 protein (most often chicken thighs) is then served over a bed of
white rice, often with a small salad on the side. A major factor in
the lack of a national profile for this Seattle specialty is the dish’s
relatively recent origin: the first restaurant to serve the
preparation that later took Seattle by storm opened in 1976. The
city now claims upward of 100 teriyaki shops, and Seattle-style
teriyaki restaurants have begun to pop up in New York, Chicago,
San Francisco, and other American cities.
● Bruce Lee
●

● Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon

Bruce Lee in a scene from Enter the Dragon, 1973.
● © 1973 Warner Brothers, Inc.
● Martial-arts icon. Movie star. Cha-cha champion. Bruce Lee was
all of these, as well as a Seattleite. He came to the city at age 18,
finishing his high-school education at Edison Technical School (a
 vocational school that is now Seattle Central College) and
enrolling at the University of Washington to study philosophy.
While in Seattle, he opened his first martial-arts studio and
began working on his first book, Chinese Gung Fu: The
Philosophical Art of Self-Defense (1987). Lee moved to California
after only a half-dozen years in Seattle, but he considered the city
his American home because that is where he met his wife and
came into his own as a martial-arts expert. After his tragic early
death at age 32, he was buried on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, and his
family has long had plans to open a Bruce Lee Action Museum in
the city.

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