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Underground Seattle

Warning:  This post is practically drowning in history.  But, it’s freaking cool history.  So try to wait it out and leave the stones marked “nerd” on the ground.  Mmmmkay?

So, imagine yourself in a restored saloon-type room listening to the hilarious Ed from the Underground Tour give you a briefing on the beginnings of Seattle. (Even if you don’t read this entire post, check out their website, it is pretty cool.)

In 1889 Seattle was a booming logging town with logs coming down the hill from the forest to the dock so quickly the street was nicknamed Skid Row.  (Seriously.  I can’t make this stuff up.)  At any rate, with all that lumber, the buildings made of wood, blah blah blah, one little fire in a carpenter’s shop covered in sawdust, located beneath a paint store and next to an armory chock full of gunpowder and TNT…well, the fire burned down the entire town in twelve hours.

As a result the city was rebuilt with stone, the fire department was expanded, and the urban planning commission decided to raise the streets by twenty feet to make room for running water and sewage pipes.  However, raising the streets of an entire city takes time, and the boomtown of Seattle didn’t have time to wait.  So they rebuilt the buildings with the knowledge that the first-floor would eventually be the basement.  The city started building retaining walls where modern-day curbs would be–between the sidewalk and the street–and eventually the lower sidewalks were covered with new sidewalks and the underground city was out of sight, out of mind.  There are stairs leading down to basement shops all over Pioneer Square, and clouded skylights in the sidewalk that were designed to let light until the sidewalks below.  Most people walking down the street assume those skylights are decorative tiling or something, the purplish glass is quite pretty and the basement-level shops were simply extra real estate.  Not entirely true, there is a whole city down there.  Granted, an abandoned, dusty, half-forgotten city, but it’s awesome.

Those windows used to look onto the street, now they look onto a retaining wall that holds up Yesler Way.  The sidewalk leads half-way around the block and into the basement of another building.

That doorway is a door that now leads to somewhere under the street.  Is anyone else fascinated by this stuff?

On the left, retaining wall tons of sawdust, gravel, and general “street raising stuff”.  On the right is a building.  Walking down a sidewalk, right underneath the current sidewalk.

Want to walk into a creepy underground building?  Watch Your Step, and Please Enter Here.

After the streets were raised and the old sidewalks covered with new sidewalks, many merchants used their now-basements as warehouses or something.  This one has painted words on the walls for grain, potatoes, and such.  There are also signs for old hotels, restaurants, and banks along with artifacts and all sorts of creepy, dusty old stuff.  Hey, there is even a legend of a haunted bank vault complete with ghostly woman who was killed a couple of hundred years ago.

After an hour underground with cold, concrete walls and puddles on the floor I was ready to head upstairs and get a cup of Hot Chocolate at the Elliott Bay Book Company; dude, Underground Tours are awesome–but they are also quite chilly.  Just sayin’.  Um, I think I could spend all day in Elliott Bay Book…wandering around and just staring at the stairs and shelves and little nooks and crannies.  It is book lover’s paradise.  Tragically, my camera was out of batteries, which means that the Internets will not see any potential evidence of my hugging the shelves and kissing the books and generally making a fool of myself.  Not that I would ever admit to that kind of blatant bibliophilia in public.  Cough.

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