LowestTravelDeals.com provides
any kind of Seattle lodging from luxury 5-star hotels to affordable
B&B's and discount motels. Our search system provides a wide
variety of options to provide you with the best Seattle hotel
deals and rates in a secure and instant transaction. We guarantee
you will find the right Seattle accommodation that fits your travel
vacation.
Curved around the shore of Elliott Bay, with Lake
Washington behind and the snowy peak of Mount Rainier hovering
faintly in the distance, SEATTLE has a magnificent
setting. The insistently modern skyline of glass skyscrapers gleams
across the bay, an emblem of three decades of aggressive urban
renewal.
Seattle's beginnings were inauspiciously muddy.
Flooded out of its first location on the flat little peninsula
of Alki Point, in the 1850s the town shifted to what's now Pioneer
Square, renaming itself after the Native American Chief Sealth
(hence Seattle). This was soggy ground, and the small logging
community built its houses on stilts. As the surrounding forest
was gradually felled and the wood shipped out, Seattle grew slowly
until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 put it firmly on the national
map. World War I boosted shipbuilding, and the city was soon a
large industrial center. Trade unions, based around the shipworkers,
grew strong, and the Industrial Workers of the World, or "Wobblies,"
coordinated the US's first general strike here on February 6,
1919.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the
Boeing airline corporation was crucial to the
city's well being, booming during World War II and employing one
in five of Seattle's workforce by the 1960s. The prosperity that
Boeing and more recent success stories such as Microsoft
and internet shopping site Amazon.com have brought the city is
obvious, reflected in a restored old center, a nationally acclaimed
arts scene with vibrant movie and music industries, and a flood
of coffee houses and excellent seafood restaurants. No longer
overshadowed by the two big California metropolises, Seattle now
regularly tops magazine surveys of desirable places to live, attracting
migrants across the social and economic spectrum, which has led
to both exponential growth and increasing traffic jams. As if
to round out the turbulent decade, a February 2001 earthquake
shook Seattle's foundations, and reminded its resi dents that
they're just as prone to Pacific Rim tremors as their southern
counterparts in the Golden State.
Despite the dizzying expansion, the city's more
established neighborhoods remain distinctive, and Seattle has
a pleasantly down-to-earth ambience.
