Pike Place Fish Market
Bustling seafood counter where fishmongers hurl whole salmon overhead to cheering crowds.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle starts with a scarred, unsellable salmon set aside each morning for one job: getting thrown by hand, sometimes two hundred times a day. It traces the ritual back to an accidental toss of a bag of clams on a cold day in the early 1980s, and forward to 1986, when the market was nearly bankrupt and owner John Yokoyama gathered his crew to make an unusual vow about what they would become. You'll hear how that vow turned into a daily ceremony of hollers and huddles before every shift. Stand at the counter and watch for the same scarred stand-in fish making its rounds.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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