Between Pike Place Market and Seattle Center lies Belltown, a dense neighborhood that has been, by turns, a working-class waterfront district, an artists' colony, and a restaurant and nightlife hub. The neighborhood takes its name from William Nathaniel Bell, one of the original Denny party settlers who staked a claim here in 1851. For most of the twentieth century, Belltown was low-rent: the hotels were single-room occupancy, the bars were for longshoremen, and the artists who arrived in the 1980s came because the space was cheap.
That combination of cheap rent and creative energy produced the conditions for grunge. Bands rehearsed in warehouses, played in taverns, and wrote the songs that became the 1990s soundtrack. The neighborhood gentrified rapidly as Seattle's tech economy drove up rents, displacing the artists and working-class residents who had made it interesting.
Today Belltown is expensive and polished, but the ghost of its funkier past shows up in the occasional alley mural, the surviving dive bar, the music venue that held on. Cities eat their creative classes and then miss them.