One mayoral candidate ran on a promise to tear the rusting towers down; instead they became one of the most influential park designs of the twentieth century. Gas Works Park, at 2101 North Northlake Way on a promontory jutting into Lake Union, preserves the remnants of the last coal gasification plant in the United States - and turned a toxic industrial ruin into Seattle's most distinctive public space. The Seattle Gas Light Company plant manufactured the city's gas from 1906 to 1956, first fro.....

Founded by comedian Dave Dennison and his wife Angela, Laughs Comedy Club has been a fixture of Seattle's University District comedy scene for more than two decades. Dave, a UCLA and Cal Poly graduate in restaurant and travel management, brought experience from a string of comedy clubs and restaurants in California and Utah before entering Seattle's International Comedy Competition in 1997. He met Angela at an open-mic night at Kirkland's Pegasus Pizza in 2002, and the partnership grew into one .....

In the historic Ballard neighbourhood of north-west Seattle, the National Nordic Museum is the largest museum in North America dedicated to the heritage, culture and contemporary contributions of the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The museum opened in May 2018 in a striking new 57,000-square-foot building designed by the Seattle-based Mithun architecture firm, replacing an earlier museum dating back to 1980 housed in a converted elementary school down the st.....

Before it was Seattle's largest indoor-outdoor music venue, the building washed diapers - a service factory in Fremont that the owners cheerfully cite as the source of the venue's character. Nectar Lounge, at 412 North 36th Street in the self-declared Center of the Universe, was handmade into a venue in 2004. The layout is the differentiator: garage-style walls open the main showroom onto a covered outdoor patio with fire pits and stage views, an upstairs mezzanine overlooks the stage with real.....

The venue borrowed its name from the high-voltage station across the street, and the underground current stuck. Substation at 645 NW 45th Street opened in spring 2015 in the industrial seam between Ballard and Fremont, founded by Dave West, Ken Wallace and Jeremy Rudo as a DIY-spirited club with a proper bar and better sound than its warehouse aesthetic suggests. The building grew into a compound: the owners eventually took the whole block-long structure, running two showrooms - the 200-capacit.....

The name came from a five-by-eight-foot oil painting of a tractor hanging over the bar - and the bar it named became the Northwest's Americana headquarters. The Tractor Tavern at 5213 Ballard Avenue NW in Seattle occupies a 1902 building that once held a Scandinavian dance hall and the New Melody Tavern. Owner Dan Cowan took the room over in August 1993 - briefly as the Old Town Music Hall - and renamed it in 1994 after bartender Dan Amell's painting, on a Ballard Avenue then so desolate that, .....

In the bustling Phinney Ridge neighbourhood about four miles north of downtown Seattle, the Woodland Park Zoo is one of the most architecturally and ecologically progressive zoos in the United States. The 92-acre zoo traces its origins to 1899, when the small private estate of the Seattle real-estate developer Guy Phinney was acquired by the city following Phinney's death and converted into a public park, with a small collection of donated animals forming the original zoo around the same time. .....