I had wanted to go on the Seattle Underground Tour since we first got to Puyallup. In case any of you haven't heard all about it, here is a little info brought to you by Wikipedia.
Seattle's first buildings were wooden. On June 6, 1889 at 2:39 in the afternoon, a cabinetmaker accidentally overturned and ignited a glue pot. An attempt to extinguish it with water spread the burning grease-based glue. The fire chief was out of town, and although the volunteer fire department responded they made the mistake of trying to use too many hoses at once; they never recovered from the subsequent drop in water pressure. This wouldn't have been so catastrophic had they not been directly next door to the local liquor store and ammo shop. The Great Seattle Fire destroyed 31 blocks.
While a destructive fire was not unusual for the time, the response of the city leaders was. Instead of rebuilding the city as it was before, they made two strategic decisions: that all new buildings must be of stone or brick, insurance against a similar disaster in the future; and to regrade the streets one to two stories higher than the original street grade. Pioneer Square had originally been built mostly on filled-in tidelands and, as a consequence, it often flooded. The new street level also assisted in ensuring that gravity-assisted flush toilets that funnelled into Elliott Bay did not back up at high tide.
But they were hasty. They didn't want to wait to do things properly, instead they needed to get right back to business to make a profit. Our tourguide had a great time making fun of Seattlites for continuing to do the same thing over and over expecting different results. Too funny. So I continue...
For the regrade, the streets were lined with concrete walls that formed narrow alleyways between the walls and the buildings on both sides of the street, with a wide "alley" where the street was. They then filled the "streets" in between the high walls with concrete. This means the streets were raised anywhere from 12 to 30 feet above the sidewalks and storefronts. Awkward. Not a single person died in the Great Seattle Fire, but 12 people died just by falling off the ladders they would have to climb up then down in order to cross the street.
When they reconstructed their buildings, merchants and landlords knew that the ground floor would eventually be underground and the next floor up would be the new ground floor, so there is very little decoration on the doors and windows of the original ground floor, but extensive decoration on the new ground floor.Once the new sidewalks were complete, building owners moved their businesses to the new ground floor, although merchants carried on business in the lowest floors of buildings that survived the fire, and pedestrians continued to use the underground sidewalks lit by the glass cubes (still seen on some streets) embedded in the grade-level sidewalk above as sunlights.
In 1907 the city condemned the Underground for fear of bubonic plague, two years before the 1909 World Fair in Seattle. The basements were left to deteriorate or were used as storage. Some became illegal flophouses for the homeless, gambling halls, speakeasies, and opium dens.
Only a small portion of the Seattle Underground has been restored and made safe and accessible to the public on guided tours. These are my pictures of those few places.
One of the original pictures taken the day after the fire. Notice the heat was so intense that it warped the railroad tracks.
One of the "sidewalks" between a building and the wall.
Those seagulls are some opportunistic buggers. Steal your ice cream right out of your hand.
Not sure what this room was used for back in the day, but currently it is a hall where quite a few creepy people choose to exchange vows. Weird.
These are those glass sunlights I described earlier from below. In a few pictures
I show them from above.
This is what they look like from above. I can't count how many of these I had walked over by this point and never realized what they were.
This was one of the earliest sewage pipes they had to take the waste out to Elliott Bay to dump. Imagine all those people and this tiny little pipe... The tourguides told stories of the residents having trouble flushing. So just as long as you were higher than your neighbor you were ok!
