A history of Seattle
As a Seattleite, I have loved delving into the history of the city. This is an excellent top-level primer about the founding of the city.
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The Big Dark in Seattle ends today (for this year)
Though we are still in the midst of winter meteorologically (hope everyone enjoyed the snow this morning!), in terms of daylight hours, today arguably marks the end to Big Dark for the season.
Today, February 6th, is:
- The longest day since before Daylight Savings Time ended on November 3rd.
- Today is the first day in which we gain 3+ minutes of daylight each day (a streak that will last until May 2nd).
- The first day with a sunset more than an hour later than our earliest of the year (5:19PM today; earliest of the year is 4:17PM).
Some additional context:
- We're only one month (31 days) from having sunsets after 7PM! (March 9th)
- We've now gained 1h25min of daylight compared to the Winter Solstice on December 21st (~9h50min, vs ~8h25min).
- By the end of February, we will gain an additional 1h12min (and 2 full hours by March 14th!).
- Our current day length (~9h50min) is on par with Winter Solstice in parts of Southern California & the Deep South states.
- In less than 2 weeks (Feb 19th), our day length will be on par with Winter Solstice in Miami.
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Dec. 2, 1869 - Seattle incorporates
It came across my Facebook feed. (I'm an old person, I have an interest in Seattle history and so Facebook shows me a fair bit of it.) The post came from the Washington State Archives:
Our Document of the Day: Seattle was incorporated 155 years ago today on December 2, 1869, by the territorial legislature. At the time, Seattle had a population of a little over 1,000 residents. Seattle was originally incorporated in 1865, governed by a board of trustees. Citizens petitioned for dissolution in 1867 due to questionable activities by the elected leaders, which the Washington Territorial Legislature in Olympia granted. Late in 1869, citizens asked for a mayor and town council in lieu of governance by a board, and the legislature granted their request with reincorporation and a new town charter.
đź“· Municipal articles of incorporation for Seattle, W.T., 1869. Territorial Laws, Washington State Archives.
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Spoke Too Soon
Remember yesterday when I posted we had survived and things were back to normal? Yeah. About that.
This morning, just as I was settling in to start my workday from home - there was a bang outside and the power went out again. It's been out since then.
I ended up going into the office and charging things while I was there, but now I'm home and we have no clear ETA on when power will be restored. The power company confirms they are aware of it but it's just marked as possibly being fixed tomorrow by 3pm, which is their default time they've been using since before our power originally came back.
So, we'll see.
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We survived
We were without power for about 36 hours thanks to the bomb cyclone. It went out around 11:30pm on Monday and we weren't sure when it was coming back. The outage map had all outages marked as Saturday at noon, but I was fairly sure we were on the same grid as the middle school across the street from us. It's why we went to the movies last night, to get out of the house and go somewhere warm.
This morning, Katie excitedly messaged me this morning when the power came back on.
I shared the following few posts during our ordeal.
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1947 Seattle City Guide
Redditor u/SatanicVersus79 shares pictures from a 1947 travel guide to Seattle. I'd love to delve into the book more and see what else it covered.
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"Seattle becomes first in U.S. to protect gig workers from sudden deactivation"
From the link:
The Seattle City Council passed legislation Tuesday that would protect gig workers from being suddenly kicked off apps like Instacart or DoorDash.
It’s the first gig worker protection measure of its kind in the entire country.
“This will help prevent homelessness, fight displacement, and allow families to meet their basic needs,” said Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who sponsored the bill.
There's a comment on HackerNews which is an example of the problem with gig work:
When I was in college, I used to work Uber as a side gig. One day, while working, my account was blocked, and I would couldn't pick up any more passengers. I was 2 hours away from home. Apparently, one of the customers had filed a complaint about a missing item (gloves or some bs like that), it was not in my car. My account was blocked until the case was "reviewed". So I had to drive back 2 hours without picking up any passengers. (The passenger later found the item in their bag)
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How Atlanta owes MARTA to Seattle
So I was perusing the Seattle subreddit and there was a post asking people to take the bus rather than drive. And in the comments there was a mention that Seattle's subway was actually in Atlanta. Digging into that, I discovered this article from 2015 which recounts what happened and why money which Seattle could have used to build a subway ended up funding Atlanta's MARTA.
Seattle once moved commuters mostly by rail. Electric streetcars and trolleys crisscrossed town a century ago, while Interurban trains ran every half hour or so, carrying passengers to stations located on a line traveling from Tacoma to north of Everett at speeds up to 60 mph.
But in the 1930s, as cars became more affordable, they pushed out trains. Buses replaced city street cars. The rail era faded even more quickly in the post-World War II boom years.
Rail almost made a comeback. As Seattle's population grew in the 1960s, civic leaders formulated a plan to build a 49-mile rapid transit system – a subway that would carry people underground throughout the city, then speed commuters above ground to points north and south. The proposed system would have crossed Lake Washington on I-90 to Bellevue and on to Redmond.
The federal government offered hundreds of millions to cover 80 percent of the costs. The project was named Forward Thrust.
Opponents feared mass transit would spur more growth and said it was too expensive. The Boeing downturn that prompted the famous Seattle billboard, "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE – Turn out the lights," doomed it for good.
King County voters rejected the regional bonds necessary to fund the rail plan—first in 1968 and then more decisively in 1970--leaving $900 million in federal funds on the table, or more than $5 billion in 2015 dollars.
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"In Bothell, they’re already staking claim to spots on July 4 parade route"
My friend Scott was actually just telling me about this when he came over before our party today. Funny to see it also covered in the Seattle Times.
Small town living is a hell of a thing.
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Seattle, the 24-hour city?
An article from Seattle Magazine which discusses the investments and efforts to make Seattle a 24-hour city:
First off, let's be honest. Seattle has never been a 24/7 city. That will change — if we want it to. A 24/7 city, and a healthy downtown, is more than just nightlife. There's an entire economy and a population of workers from hospital staff and caregivers, emergency services, those in the restaurant and hotel industry, warehouse and janitorial employees as well as entertainment professionals who need services during their off-hours.
Proponents of the 24-hour model (think cities such as London, Tokyo, New York, and Buenos Aires) cite the benefits of a place that never sleeps — boosting tourism, being more inclusive of all types of workers, having more entertainment, and an assumed extra layer of safety if a bus stop or a train station is filled with riders. Not only that, but it'd just be cooler if we had one. Few people's best nights of their life ended at 10 p.m.
In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Bruce Harrell stressed a "downtown activation plan" focused on filling vacant storefronts, converting unused office space to housing, and creating a linear arts-entertainment-culture district that connects downtown with multiple neighborhoods. He even mentioned the possibility of creating a "24/7 street."
That would be "a stretch of several blocks where you can find a restaurant, bar, grocery, or your favorite clothing boutique at any hour of the day," he said. "We have to realize that economic activity at our city's core is essential to our shared prosperity."
Personally, I'll believe it when I see it. We rely on too much commuting for downtown to make it a 24-hour city yet.
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Seattle tops big cities for fastest growth rate with 2.4%
From July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, Seattle had a net gain of about 17,750 people, bringing the total population to 749,000. The city’s growth rate for the year pencils out to 2.4%, easily the fastest among the 50 largest U.S. cities. The rate of growth is quite comparable to what we saw in the 2010s.
This news may come as a surprise to some Seattleites. The Emerald City was hit hard by the pandemic, like many of the nation’s biggest cities. Last year, I wrote that Seattle had a net loss of about 4,300 people from 2020 to 2021, according census data. That figure actually underestimated the decline. The Census Bureau has since revised the number to a loss of about 9,000, which makes the strong growth from 2021 to 2022 all the more remarkable.
Also remarkable: All the fastest-growing big cities last year, with the exception of Seattle, were located in the Sunbelt. Fort Worth, Texas, was No. 2, with 2% growth. Charlotte, N.C.; Miami; and Jacksonville, Fla.; rounded out the top five. In fact, after Seattle, the next 15 fastest-growing big cities were all in the Sunbelt.
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Seattle-area Pagliacci pizza is planning delivery via drones
I shared a video a few weeks ago about Zipline and its work in Africa delivering medicine. It was very cool stuff. To hear that they are in discussions to explore using the drones for delivery is surprising. To do it in Seattle, home of Amazon, seems like a bold move.
We'll see.
But, I mean, I'd love to be able to get Pagliacci's delivered to my neck of the woods.
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Seattle International Film Festival buys Cinerama
Cinerama was the movie theater that Paul Allen funded as a fan of movies. It closed in 2020 and has been since then. Well, that changes soon. SIFF announced it has purchased Cinerama.
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The History of the Seattle Mariners, Part 1
A friend turned me onto this six-part documentary on YouTube documenting the history of the Seattle Mariners. I nearly completely binged it on my flight home yesterday. I'm not declaring myself a Mariners fan (my wife and her family would not be happy) but I certainly appreciate the team a great deal more with this history.
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Seattle bans caste discrimination
The city council in the capital of Washington state voted on Tuesday night to add caste, a hierarchical social system dating back thousands of years and practised throughout South Asia among people of all religions, to the city’s anti-discrimination laws.
I think this is an excellent thing to call out, even though castes do not dominate American culture the way they do in other parts of the world, that discrimination can (and does) follow people here. Here's hoping this protection continues to gain traction elsewhere in the US.
That said - I do have to call out that they refer to Seattle as the capital, which is incorrect. Washington's capital is Olympia, Washington. Though Seattle badly wanted it to be here when it joined the union.
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Seattle traffic from the 1970s
Someone just stood on the corner and filmed the traffic and the monorail. A moment transported through time to us today fifty years later.
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Seattle #2 in Cannabis usage vs. Nicotine, Portland is #1
In surveys conducted between March 2021 and January 2022, around 865,000 people age 18 and older in the Seattle market area — about 20% of the adult population — said they had used cannabis (including edibles) in the past 30 days. Only around 560,000 (13%) had smoked cigarettes or used one of the newer nicotine-based alternatives, e-cigarettes and vapes.
The one place where cannabis outpaces nicotine by an even wider margin? It's not exactly a surprise. In Portland, about 21% of adults used cannabis compared with 13% who smoked or vaped nicotine products, for a gap of 8 percentage points. The San Francisco market area ranked third, with a gap of around 6 points.
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PSE energy stations among those attacked in Washington & Oregon in November
At least five attacks at electricity substations in Washington and Oregon, including two at Puget Sound Energy substations, have been reported to the FBI in recent weeks.
Spokespeople for Puget Sound Energy, the Cowlitz County Public Utility District and Bonneville Power Administration confirmed the attacks happened in November, according to emails sent in response to Seattle Times inquiries.
The FBI declined to confirm it is investigating the attacks, but the utilities say they are cooperating with a federal investigation.
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A look at Seattle Duwamish Indigenous Place Names and Settlements
The graphics aren't large, but it has some very interesting maps showing historic settlement locations of where the various groups of Duwamish people lived.
26. SWAH-tsoo-gweel ('portage'). Duwamish. Around the top margins of Union Bay. Five longhouses were located on the N edge of the bay, which--pre-1916--lay nearly a mile further N. One longhouse was near the present UW steam plant, and one near the former Battelle Institute campus. This was the principal village of an influential group known as hloo-weelh-AHBSH who took their name from the s’hloo-WEELH (literally, "a tiny hole drilled to measure the thickness of a canoe"), the narrow passage through the resource-rich Union Bay marsh. All the people living around Lake Washington were collectively known as hah-choo-AHBSH, that is, people of HAH-choo, meaning 'a large lake' and referring to present-day Lake Washington. (2, 8)
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"Seattle police recruits now learn about history, communities before setting foot in the academy"
The Before the Badge program is part of the Seattle Police Department's response to the racial reckoning ignited by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, and the resulting demands that police nationwide reimagine how they interact with their citizenry, particularly communities of color that have historically experienced biased policing.
Recruits who have yet to attend the Basic Law Enforcement Academy, required for all entry-level officers in the state, are first learning the city's history and why there's been tension between Seattle police and different groups of residents — and how people's experiences can influence how they react when a cop knocks on their door.
"I do think this is an opportunity for us to really change how we're training our officers and how we're offering a level of support for our brand-new recruits," said SPD Chief Adrian Diaz, who came up with the idea for the pre-academy training program. "There's no one [else] in the country doing this work … We want to push that envelope, we want to do something that I think is innovative, that actually changes how we police."
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