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Introduction
Seattle is a city that has battled itself out of the ashes multiple times, starting with an overturned pot of glue that burned the nascent city to the ground in 1889; the author Rudyard Kipling, sailing by on his way from Tacoma to Vancouver, described the ruined city as “a horrible black smudge, as if a Hand had come down and rubbed the place smooth. I now know what being wiped out means.”
Almost 100 years after the Great Fire, a similar sign of the times would emerge over the economically depressed city, mired in the “Boeing Bust”, in this case a literal billboard put up near Sea-Tac Airport by two real estate agents, famously requesting that the last person in Seattle please “turn out the lights.