This story is presented as part of this week’s New to Town issue.
Congrats on the new job, Deb. (Mind if I call you Deb?) Good for you for getting that signing bonus (God, I hope you have one) and moving to a city you’ve heard so much about.
As a person who lived in Seattle for the last seven years, I have some thoughts about what Seattle is like to live in. I know what it’s like to be new here, because I was new here seven years ago. And I also know what it’s like to move away: I recently moved back to the Midwest, to a part of the country not frantically under construction, an area where the overall attitude toward life has eased into menopause. As innocuous as that analogy may seem, I can assure you that a Cap Hill resident is seething wildly after reading it.*
When I first moved to Seattle, the complaints from longtime residents were mostly that the old days of the early 2000s were long over—music venues with boxing rings or laundromats with pancake bars were replaced by off-white storefronts with a fiddle-leaf fig in the window. When I left Seattle six months ago, the sole complaint on everyone’s lips was that Amazon had ruined everything. I don’t know about that, but you should know there’s a neighborhood with an Amazon chute system that delivers items to your Fjallraven Kanken backpack before you even know that you want them. I can’t remember the name of that neighborhood, but I know they sell “keep [neighborhood] weird” T-shirts.