As I look out the window of my workspace in downtown Seattle, all I see are cranes, construction, and excavations. While this might seem like poetic exaggeration, my perch has put me at the epicenter of Seattle’s transformation from a big little city into something that feels more metropolitan. More accurately, though, it might be called Amazon’s transformation of Seattle.
Amazon’s closest tech peers, old and new, were born in suburbs or decamped there: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a suburban garage in 1994, but the company has since been housed in a succession of ever-more-expansive digs in Seattle proper: next to a well-regarded barbecue joint south of the now-demolished Kingdome (the “Sodo” neighborhood); in the lovely onetime heroin district downtown, in which office I worked during a six-month stint at the firm in 1996–97; and in a former medical complex that loomed like a supervillain’s gleaming lair high above Seattle as you drove into the city from the south.