Any Given Sunday at Pike Place Market
It seems that Seattle gets a very bad rep from the kind of Americans who have decided that their country is “rotting” from the inside. “Stop the rot” was the excuse of a very good friend of mine to vote for Donald Trump. --Everyone is saying it-- I remember him adding. The narrative is fed by the notion that some American cities are unliveable and teeming with crime and chaos. With mere anecdotical evidence, the kind that seems to flow from the imagination of one of those angry old neighbours that like to pick on kids, the said Americans tend to single out cities run by anyone who doesn´t claim to be very tough on crime and homelessness, typically a democrat. It’s a story so often repeated that it begins to pass for evidence. Seattle is often cast in that role. You are constantly warned not to walk around alone, which I did many times in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
I did see one robbery. Near Pioneer Square, close to Tat’s Deli, someone snatched a camera from a woman’s hands in a parking lot. A DHL driver and a few passersby ran after the thief, and they seemed to recover the stolen items. It could have been me, I remember thinking; it was my first time in Seattle. Beyond that, I saw the same public unraveling one encounters in many large cities of the so-called free world: open drug use, erratic behavior, moments of sadness that were visible but not exceptional.
As a standard tech worker, I usually stayed in South Lake Union. My favorite way to disobey the warnings was to walk from the hotel to Pike Place Market. It is only 1.5 kilometres, and there are few urban landscapes capable of intimidating someone whose university commute once involved walking near 19th Street and Caracas Avenue in Bogotá, Colombia.
In my mind, Pike Place was inseparable from Seattle’s musical mythology. The city gave the world Jimi Hendrix and grunge, and the market of the 1990s, less polished than today’s version, seems to have offered exactly the unvarnished aesthetic that is associated to the genre: dark corridors, neon signs, wet alleys, a certain beautiful gloom. One can almost imagine Kurt Cobain’s voice threading through the calls of fishmongers, butchers, and flower vendors. There is a legendary photo series of the Cobains in a hotel condominium directly overlooking the market, taken when Nirvana was rocketing into fame. Going there for the first time felt like a pilgrimage: to grunge, certainly, but also to a bruised and magnetic corner of Americana.
Much of Pike Place’s allure comes from the human tempo of the market. Its vendors are strikingly cordial: come close enough and someone will offer a taste of beef jerky at Don & Joe’s Meats or a slice of mango at Sosio’s. There is dignity in the way they work, a certain palpable pride in placing good produce before strangers, a serious but joyful professionalism I have otherwise only seen in seasoned craftsmen or distinguished practitioners of the liberal professions. They cater for customers as if every stall were personally clerked by its owner.
At one corner stands Pike Place Fish Market, famous for the ritual of vendors tossing a king salmon to catch the attention of passersby. It is grungy enough, a little tourist-trappy, and still worth seeing. The more literal shrine to grime is the Gum Wall: a narrow passage whose walls are layered with an almost infinite assortment of chewed gum. When I first heard of it, I imagined a museum of historic chewing gum, perhaps even the petrified remains of Hendrix’s last bubble. Do not expect that much. Bring a ready stomach. This is a collection of stinky bubble gum chewed by anonymous visitors.
Beyond the seafood (the clam chowder at the Athenian is excellent) my favorite reason to return is the pianists. Johnny Hahn, white-bearded and unmistakable, has been hauling his custom 64-key upright piano on a hand truck to his favored patch of cobblestones since 1986. In a city that has exported so many sounds to the world, his presence gives the market a gentle soundtrack.
My favorite is the pianist under the red umbrella. He sits at the corner of the fish market, in front of a keyboard sometimes decorated with pumpkins. I do not know his name, but his rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” rolls merrily through the market’s noise, and on a good Saturday or Sunday a weary traveller can use it as the perfect soundtrack for people-watching. As every kind of person moves past, the city briefly expands into a metropolis and the visitor is granted the small fantasy of belonging to it. Of being a cosmopolitan Seattleite. The playing is sophisticated, theatrical, and full of urban joy; if Seattle were a Mecca of cinema rather than music, the scene might have wandered out of a Woody Allen film.
Bohemian Rhapsody
