SEATTLE — It was a decade of progress and innovation.
"It was like the whole town had gotten a new coat of paint," said Jennifer Ott, Executive Director of HistoryLink.
January 1, 1990 saw Seattle's first Black mayor take office.
"The decade kicked off with the election of Norm Rice," said historian and author Brad Holden.
Six years later, the voters of Washington would elect the first Asian American governor in the continental US.
"It was a big step forward," Ott said, "and it was an important one."
"Being out in the forefront of having people in high power positions that maybe the rest of the country looked at as an anomaly," added KING 5 News anchor Joyce Taylor.
Inclusion and a new respect for our waters led to Seattle's first Salmon Homecoming event in the early '90s.
"It became this place to acknowledge, to really mark the return of the salmon in the fall," Ott said.
And more than 20 years before legalization, weed culture found broad acceptance at Seattle's first Hempfest.
"What a scene," Ott said.
But the '90s weren't all joy and jubilation. An arson fire at the Pang warehouse took the lives of four Seattle firefighters.
"There were just so many layers of tragedy involved in that story," Taylor said.
It was a tragedy made even worse by the fact that one of the Pang's own family members set the blaze.
"Their son then turns out to have been responsible for the arson that caused the fire, for them to lose their business," Taylor said.
Of course, movies and music put us in the spotlight, but it was our leading role in technology that kept us there.
"Seattle really significantly changed when Microsoft released Windows 95," said Holden. "The city has never been the same since, for better or for worse."
The mid-90s rise of the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Bookseller," Amazon, would transform Seattle and the world.
It gave us one more reason to get online any way we could.
"When the internet first came out, not everybody had a personal computer, or had access to the internet from their home," Holden said. "So, a lot of people, they would go to these internet cafes that started popping up. For a lot of people, including myself, that was our introduction to the internet."
Even "Evening" made some history, working with a local tech firm to stream a post-broadcast web show years before YouTube.
The '90s nearly gave rise to a vast new Central Park.
Ott said, "In 1995, the thing that didn't happen is that the Seattle Commons Park was voted down and the public rejected that idea."
Some far-flung news gripped our attention, such as the 1997 death of Princess Diana.
"That was one of those stories that had a global impact all the way back to Seattle," recalled Taylor.
As a journalist, she covered the funeral in person.
"And on the same flight was Jean Enersen and Kathi Goertzen," Taylor said. "It was a given that we were all going to be traveling to London."
The decade - and millennium - ended in chaos, as a "Battle in Seattle" raged around the WTO meeting of world leaders.
"I was just there as an observe," Holden said. "Once the tear gas came out that's when I decided it was a good time to leave."
Seattle and the Pacific Northwest grew up in the '90s, faced with the warning signs and the promise of what was yet to come.
"A time when Seattle built on its strengths," Ott said.
Holden added, "It was an interesting time."
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