Pike Place Market is the Seattle landmark above which Kate Mularkey and Tully Hart begin living together after graduation. The Market gives their first shared apartment a distinctive setting and places their everyday life within walking distance of the bars, cafés, and streets that define their new independence.

Setting and Shared Home

The summer after graduation, Kate and Tully find an inexpensive, 1960s-style apartment in a prime location above Pike Place Market. They furnish it with pieces from Gran’s house, including old Revereware pots and Spode china, and decorate with favorite posters and photographs of themselves. Mrs. Mularkey adds groceries and silk plants, helping turn the apartment into a home rather than merely a place to stay.

Everyday Life Around the Market

The neighborhood organizes the friends’ routine. Their favorite nearby bars are the Athenian, inside the Market, and the smoky Virginia Inn on the corner. At six in the morning, amid delivery-truck beeps and car horns, they cross the street for Starbucks lattes and buy croissants at La Panier. The details place their companionship in a working urban landscape, where the day begins alongside the Market’s deliveries and the city’s traffic.

A Base for Their Early Careers

As working single women, Kate and Tully make breakfast outings part of their daily rhythm, sitting at sidewalk ironwork tables to read the newspapers they collect, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times, and the Post-Intelligencer. From the apartment and its surrounding neighborhood, they commute to the television-news office and learn the business. Pike Place Market thus anchors a period when their close friendship and shared professional life are woven into the same ordinary routine.

A Place in Their Relationship

The Market setting also belongs to the emotional history of Kate and Tully’s early adulthood. In a later moment, Johnny Ryan walks Kate home after acknowledging the long-standing bond between Kate and Tully and the possibility that he and Tully might have been together. The apartment remains the destination of that walk, linking the neighborhood to the complicated loyalties surrounding their friendship as well as to their earlier domestic life.