Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is a visually rich cultural exploration of Seattle, capturing the mercurial nature of this dynamic city. Through both experiential and data-driven cartography, this book appeals to longtime residents, newcomers, and those curious about the city's unique charm.

Known for its airplanes, grunge music, gourmet coffee, and e-commerce, Seattle is a city full of surprises. In the style of Infinite City and Portlandness, this illustrated book delves into an expansive range of topics, from UFO sightings to pinball legacies, gray skies to frontier psychology, celebrating strong women and strong coffee.

With compelling infographic visuals, the book unravels over 50 fascinating narratives about the green metropolis perched at the edge of the Salish Sea.

Seattle's waterfront has served as a central hub for people, transportation, and commerce since time immemorial. A low natural shoreline provided the Duwamish-Suquamish people with excellent canoe access to permanent villages and seasonal fishing camps. High bluffs served as a sacred place for tribal members' final journey to the spirit world.

When the first settlers arrived in the 1850s, Seattle's shoreline began to change drastically. Emerald hills covered with dense forests were logged for timber to make way for the new city. As time passed, Seattle constructed a log seawall, wooden sidewalks, wharfs, buildings, streets, railroad trestles, and eventually, a massive concrete viaduct over the original aquatic lands, changing the natural environment to a built environment.

Today, Seattle's shoreline continues to change as the city demolishes the viaduct, rebuilds the seawall, and creates an inviting new waterfront that all will enjoy for generations to come.

Seattle was a very different city in 1960 than it is today. There were no black bus drivers, sales clerks, or bank tellers. Black children rarely attended the same schools as white children. And few black people lived outside of the Central District. In 1960, Seattle was effectively a segregated town.

Energized by the national civil rights movement, an interracial group of Seattle residents joined together to form the Seattle chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Operational from 1961 through 1968, CORE had a brief but powerful effect on Seattle. The chapter began by challenging one of the more blatant forms of discrimination in the city, local supermarkets. Located within the black community and dependent on black customers, these supermarkets refused to hire black employees. CORE took the supermarkets to task by organizing hundreds of volunteers into shifts of continuous picketers until stores desegregated their staffs.

From this initial effort, CORE, in partnership with the NAACP and other groups, launched campaigns to increase employment and housing opportunities for black Seattleites, and to address racial inequalities in Seattle public schools. The members of Seattle CORE were committed to transforming Seattle into a more integrated and just society.

Seattle was one of more than one hundred cities to support an active CORE chapter. Seattle in Black and White tells the local, Seattle story about this national movement. Authored by four active members of Seattle CORE, this book not only recounts the actions of Seattle CORE but, through their memories, also captures the emotion and intensity of this pivotal and highly charged time in America’s history.

Seattle Vice delves into the murky underworld of the Emerald City, where strippers, prostitution, dirty money, and crooked cops paint a vivid picture of corruption.

This no-holds-barred account chronicles the exploits of Frank Colacurcio, Sr. and his crime family, dominating Seattle's power and politics much like the notorious Mafia dons of New York and Chicago. Known as the Pacific Northwest's most successful strip club owner, Colacurcio's life is a tale of excess and crime, having amassed wealth while facing multiple felony charges.

At the age of 92, Colacurcio still stands at the center of Seattle's historic narrative of vice and corruption, smiling into the camera as a symbol of the city's complicated past.

Discovered in 1855, Green Lake has been an essential feature within Seattle's distinctive juxtaposition of landscape architecture and urban expansion, providing recreation and community focus for the last 150 years.

Named after the persistent algae bloom that still occurs, the lake is a valuable natural landmark at the center of a neighborhood in transition. Its past is threaded with tenacious organizations and ambitious individuals.

From its first homesteader, Erhart "Green Lake John" Saifried, to the vision of the Olmsted brothers, from Guy Phinney's menagerie to the triumph and tragedy of Helene Madison, from ice-skating to the Aqua Follies, this broad collection of vintage images illustrates a bygone era and provides a unique perspective on community values and ecological struggle.