Grunge Era

Familiar to many for Starbucks Corp.’s coffee, the downtown fish market, ferries sliding by snow-capped mountains and perpetual mist, Seattle for decades was more akin to a blue-collar manufacturing town. Lumber, airplanes and fishing were dominant. The economy was remade by waves of technology investment -- most prominently in the 1990s by native son Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corp., when the rise of Nirvana and other grunge bands also made it a pacesetter for music and fashion.

“Seattle reigns,” Newsweek magazine wrote in a May 1996 cover story. “Sooner or later, it seems, everyone moves to Seattle, or thinks about it, or at least their kids do.”

This latest boom is led by companies that were in their infancy then, or hadn’t even started. Besides Amazon, which went public in 1997, they include online businesses such as Zillow Inc., Blue Nile Inc. and Zulily Inc.

At Zillow, the starting salary for Seattle software developers is $100,000; it was $65,000 when the real-estate Web site went live in 2006, said Chief Executive Officer Spencer Rascoff.

Career Advice

“Tell your kids to go into computer science,” he said.

The Seattle area’s unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent in April, the lowest since May 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Amazon’s global workforce has more than doubled in two years, to 117,300 as of December 2013 from 56,200 in 2011; the company doesn’t disclose local hiring. Blocks of new towers house workers in its headquarters complex just north of downtown. On a stretch once dominated by car lots and the King Cat Theater music venue, Amazon will build offices with three translucent, intersecting spheres that resemble soap bubbles.

“Seattle is becoming one of the places to be again,” said Brett Wilson, general manager of the nearby Wasabi Bistro. A big seller there is the $16 rock-star roll: crab and avocado topped with sockeye salmon and a sesame sauce. The restaurant added an omakase platter last month, a chef-chosen menu Wilson said can cost as much as $100.