Seattle was a small sleepy town until fairly recently. In the 1970’s there were streets full of boarded up homes, and the east side was where you went camping.
I had a small house on Lake Sammamish and it was worth $110k – and that wasn’t that long ago.
Seattle is now an island of happy-nice-(foolish)-urbanites surrounded by a vast agrarian territory constituting the majority of the territorial united states. It is a very unnatural economy (spoken as someone who built multiple tech companies there).
It has also peaked. If it didn’t peak in the 90’s. Living in seattle in the 90’s was probably only matched by London in the 1890’s and Paris in the 20’s. It was one of the greatest quality of life experiences a person could live through.
WHy does it have hunting trophies? The same reason other regions have ‘tokens of our more simple past’ – pasts we escape to when we understand we are on a treadmill for the excitement of it – and the benefit of others we know not of.