Seattle History Underground

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Seattle History Underground

By Barbara Smith

A slightly weather-beaten sandwich-board sign stands on the sidewalk in Seattle's Pioneer Square. Thousands of downtown office workers walk past it daily, most paying no attention to its ad for an "Underground Tour." Anyone interested in history only needs a glance at the sign's "Guided Walking Tour, Seattle History" to know this is something to check out. The sandwich-board entices 150,000 people a year to venture into Seattle's subterranean past.

"We're here today celebrating stupidity," guide Barb deadpans in her introduction to a 90-minute tour under three blocks of downtown Seattle, a walk as entertaining as it is informative. This isn't an excursion for people clinging to the notion history is dull and dry.

Motivated solely by profit, Seattle's founding fathers set out to build a town on a 1,500-acre mud flat. In their aesthetics-be-damned town, slapped-together frame buildings stood on wooden stilts. Heightening the ramshackle look, the town was criss-crossed by sewer and water pipes made from hollowed-out scrap logs propped up on wooden braces. Dollar signs maybe blinded the first settlers to how ugly the place was, but it's hard to understand why no one spotted the obvious—they'd built a fire trap. On June 6, 1889, a fire turned Seattle into ashes. This could have been the chance to start over, to raise the land at least to the point where the replacement buildings didn't have to stand on stilts. But, Barb explains, they rebuilt first and then raised the land around the new buildings, creating the "Underground."

We tour group members exchange looks. Either the guide is kidding or her "celebrating stupidity" phrase is no joke. Descending from the sidewalk on a crumbling cement staircase, Barb explains the area we're going into is condemned—and has been for nearly 90 years. She has our attention now.

Dollar signs maybe blinded the first settlers to how ugly the place was, but it's hard to understand why no one spotted the obvious—they'd built a fire trap.

While our eyes adjust to the sunless cellar my first impression is, yes, this place looks and smells exactly as you'd expect a place condemned for nearly 90 years to look and smell. And along with the dank aroma, there's a story of an old, abandoned city below-ground.

Here are storefronts, windows, doors and sidewalks where they shouldn't be, architectural oddities silently testifying to logic motivated by greed. Then something stranger still catches my eye. A toilet. Not just an ordinary toilet, though. Of course it's old and dilapidated like its surroundings. The strange thing about this toilet is its placement atop a raised platform. Although the fixture's elevation invites the inevitable quips about a "throne," it also appears to make the modern convenience extremely inconvenient. Imagine scrambling up some four feet or so every time nature calls.

But installing a toilet at Seattle's original ground level was an invitation to disaster. Until the land was raised above sea level, successfully flushing a toilet depended upon the tides. When the tide was out, ground-level plumbing worked well. When the tide was in, one flush could result in an impressive geyser shooting from the bowl. To avoid this, toilets were built on platforms. As an extra precaution the daily newspaper ran the tide schedules on the front page.

Walking the passageways past rows of underground windows and doorways, I realized the city must have looked even stranger once the new buildings were up than it did before the fire; all new stores and office buildings had big fancy entrances one story above the then-current street level. Stranger still, there would have been no obvious way of getting up to those fancy doors. At street level, however, beside the boardwalks there were also windows and doors. The lower entrances, the ones accessible while all the road raising was going on, were much smaller and less elaborate.