MARINERS CITY

Seattle is the largest city in the U.S. state of Washington, and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. It is situated between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, about 108 miles (180 km) south of the Canadian border, in King County. Seattle is home to various professional sports teams; Seattle Mariners, Major League Baseball, Seattle Seahawks, National Football League, Seattle Supersonics, National Basketball Association, Seattle Storm, Women's National Basketball Association, Seattle Thunderbirds, National Hockey League and the Seattle Sounders. In addition, the University of Washington, Seattle University, and Seattle Pacific University field teams in a variety of sports, most notably football and basketball. Seattle is sometimes referred to as the "rainy city", even though it gets less rain than many other U.S. cities. It has also been called Jet City, due to the heavy influence of Boeing. Its official nickname is the Emerald City. Seattle is known as the home of grunge music, has a reputation for heavy coffee consumption, and was the site of the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization shut down by demonstrators. Major events in Seattle's history include the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, which destroyed the central business district ; the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, which is largely responsible for the current layout of the University of Washington campus; the Seattle General Strike of 1919, the first general strike in the country; the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, a World's Fair; the 1990 Goodwill Games; and the WTO Meeting of 1999, shut down by street protests and rioting. Being so much younger than the cities of Europe and the eastern U.S., Seattle has a lower profile in terms of art museums than it does in the performing arts. It is nonetheless home to five major art museums and galleries: Consolidated Works, the Frye Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Several Seattle museums and cultural institutions that are not specifically art museums also have excellent art collections, most notably the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, which has an excellent collection of Native American artwork. Seattle is also home to well over 100 commercial art galleries, at least a dozen non-profit art galleries, and perhaps a hundred artists' studios that are open to the public at least once a month. About half of these galleries and studios are concentrated in one neighborhood, Pioneer Square. Seattle has a few fortune 500 company's based in the city, a list of the United States' largest companies, based on total revenue are; financial services company Washington Mutual (#103), insurance company Safeco Corporation (#267), clothing merchant Nordstrom (#286), Internet retailer Amazon. COM (#342) and coffee chain Starbucks (#425). The Space Needle is possibly Seattle's most famous landmark, featured in the logo of the television show Frasier, and dating from the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, a World's Fair. The Seattle monorail line constructed for the Exposition still exists today between Seattle Center and Downtown, though the trains have been idle since spring 2004 due to a Memorial Day fire. Other famous landmarks include the Smith Tower, Pike Place Market, the Fremont Troll, the Experience Music Project, the new Seattle Central Library, and the Bank of America Tower, which is the fourth tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi River and the twelfth tallest in the nation.