Beneath the Streets - Seattle

 

    Following our great "Six Women" history tour, we took a walking tour to explore Seattle's Underground.  The company's name is Beneath the Streets, and it was such a fun and educational experience. ( Website )

    First, some background, and I rarely do this, but Wikipedia explains better than I can:

"At approximately 2:20 p.m. on June 6, 1889, an overturned glue pot in a carpentry shop accidentally started the most destructive fire in the history of Seattle. After this Great Seattle Fire,  new construction was required to be of masonry, and the town's streets were regraded one to two stories higher. Pioneer Square had originally been built mostly on filled-in tidelands and often flooded. The new street level also kept sewers draining into Elliott Bay from backing up at high tide.

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. The naturally steep hillsides were used and, through a series of sluices, material was washed into the wide "alleys", by raising the streets to the desired new level, generally 12 feet (3.7 m) higher than before, in some places nearly 30 feet (9.1 m).

At first, pedestrians climbed ladders to go between street level and the sidewalks in front of the building entrances. Brick archways were constructed next to the road surface, above the submerged sidewalks. Vault lights (a form of walk-on skylight with small panes of clear glass which later became amethyst-colored) were installed over the gap from the raised street and the building, creating the area now called the Seattle Underground.

 

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 vault lights (still seen on some streets) embedded in the grade-level vaulted sidewalk above."  ( Wikipedia )

    It was a massive feat of engineering.  Entire hillsides were leveled with hydraulic cannons, formerly used in mining, and the dislodged earth formed the new city streets.

    David was our tour guide, and he led us on an approximately four-block, two-hour tour that include underground and above-ground sites, explaining the construction and telling us great history along the way.  It was a great introduction to the city and to something that makes Seattle quite unique.

    Following the tour, we went to the smallest national park in the US, the Klondike Gold Rush National Park.  Seattle was a major staging area for Americans heading north during the 1890s hoping to strike it rich.  The vast majority did not strike it rich, but many Seattle merchants, politicians, and other criminals did get very wealthy by catering to and/or stealing from the miners.   

An illustration of the 10-12 feet elevation