A lovely New York Times article on the re-opening of Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry:
“The museum pays tribute, for example, to the many corporate giants that were born and thrived here, so startlingly out of proportion to the city’s modest population (now just over 600,000). There is a 1920s Model T reconfigured to look like an early truck from United Parcel Service, established as the American Messenger Company in Seattle in 1907. There are galleries devoted to Boeing and Microsoft, a tribute to Amazon, and displays about major breakthroughs in medical treatments that evolved here (including improved dialysis machines and cardiac defibrillators). Somehow the museum even has the hand-painted wooden sign that stood outside the first Starbucks in 1971 …
“But at the same time, the museum celebrates the dropout bohemianism of the Beat scene, the grunge rebellion of Seattle bands and decades of countercultural protest and environmental activism. The recent legalization of marijuana in Washington State is prefigured by other enthusiasms; 99 bottles of beer are mounted on one wall, each locally brewed …
“The spirit of the place is strong, its stance vigorous, its imagination fertile. It is Seattle in an alluring self-portrait.”