Grunge, jazz, and rock royalty
Seattle produced grunge, but Jackson Street came first. From the 1930s the street ran a dense jazz circuit where a teenage Quincy Jones and a newly arrived Ray Charles both cut their teeth, and Jimi Hendrix was born a few miles away in 1942 — a lineage the city rarely gets credit for. Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam arrived half a century later and rewrote rock from the same few blocks. The city sits between Puget Sound and Lake Washington with the Cascades and Olympics as backdrop, and much of downtown rests on hills that were sluiced into the bay in the early 1900s to flatten them. Pike Place Market has run since 1907. The coffee obsession is real and predates the chain that exported it.
