Seattle: City of the Year

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Photograph by Alessandra Petlin

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Photograph by Alessandra Petlin

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Fast Cities 2009

When Fast Company named Seattle its 2009 City of the Year -- based on the city's creativity, the editors said -- surely, I thought, the weather and the winters must have had something to do with it. Our winters are dark: At 47 degrees latitude, the winter solstice brings sundown at 4:21 p.m. and sunrise at 7:54 a.m. Our winters are gray: While we get only 38 inches of rain per year -- less than New York or Boston, Houston or Atlanta -- we average 154 days of precipitation. Our winters are long: Cloudy season begins in October and lasts into June; we boast an average of 226 cloudy days a year.

But consider the bounty those long, dark, damp winters have provided the world. There's Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon and its Kindling, Boeing jets, Frango mints, Pearl Jam, Costco, Jones Soda, Jimi Hendrix, salmon jerky. That's an impressive list for a city of just 600,000 people tucked in a remote corner of America, wedged tightly between two mountain ranges, and pushed up against the cold, deep Puget Sound.

Now, in our nation's economic winter, Seattle's multifaceted economy and forward-thinking business climate have given the city a little extra insulation; the jobless rate in January was 6.8%, more than a percentage point better than the national average. This is the kind of city that will thrive and lead us into recovery.

So I set out to explore why, exactly, so many creative, influential minds -- both native and transplanted, from Quincy Jones to Bill and Melinda Gates, Cameron Crowe to Sir Mix-a-Lot -- who have contributed so much to the world, love this city and call it home.

I grew up in Seattle. My father was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn; my mother, a Tlingit Indian-Irish hybrid from Alaska. They met when they were stationed on the same U.S. Army base in Germany, then settled here to be near my mom's extended family and because my architect dad thought it would be good for his career. (He did some work on the Space Needle.) When I was 18, I moved to New York, where I lived for 18 years. I came back, family in tow, on September 9, 2001. All I can say about my defection is that I left for the proverbial greener pastures. I returned when I realized there is no place greener than the Emerald City.

"Fundamentally," says Richard Tait, who founded the game maker Cranium here and now heads a brand consultancy called Boom Boom Brands, "this is a frontier city," a place of "pioneering spirit" and "big ideas." Certainly, Seattle has been a center for technological innovation since its early days. In the 1850s, just after the arrival of the area's first white settlers, some clever loggers realized that the best way to get their timber downhill to the bay was to slide it. Thus was born Skid Road -- now known as Yesler Way, after the man who owned Seattle's first lumber mill. A few decades later, William Boeing moved here from Detroit, established the Boeing Airplane Co., and grew his passion into a global giant. In 1975, two Seattleites wrote the first BASIC programming language for a computer. Their names were Paul Allen and Bill Gates, and their little outfit was called Microsoft.

Since Microsoft put down roots here in 1979 -- Allen and Gates started the firm in New Mexico, but had the good sense to move home -- Seattle has become a nexus of computerized creativity, with myriad startups and VC firms funded by some of the 10,000-plus millionaires minted here over the past three decades. "The weather lends itself completely to the lifestyle of a programmer," says John Cordell, one of the original architects of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. He compares the intricate craftsmanship of a top programmer with that of a master clocksmith: "You go into a hole and work 80 hours a week for eight months, then come out of the hole and take a break to recharge your batteries. Seattle has eight months of bad weather and four months of absolutely beautiful weather. It's the perfect place for software engineers."

Seattleites' creativity goes beyond the computer. This is home to some of the world's top medical brain trusts: the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, the University of Washington Medical Center, and the Bastyr University Research Institute, a global pioneer in science-based natural medicine. Seattle, the rare city that boosted its municipal arts budget as the economy stalled in 2008, radiates cultural inspiration. There's the Intiman Theatre, directed by the genius Bartlett Sher, and the art-glass scene, led by Dale Chihuly. This is the birthplace of grunge and Sub Pop Records. And for three of the past five years, we have been ranked America's most literate city, based on criteria including education level and the number of bookstores. (We placed a dismal second in the other two.) We are home to a plethora of fine writers, from National Book Award winners Timothy Egan and Sherman Alexie to best sellers such as Tom Robbins and ... Garth Stein.