Seattle Underground
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The Seattle Underground is a network of underground passageways and basements in downtown Seattle, Washington, United States that was ground level at the city's origin in the mid-1800s. After the streets were elevated, these spaces eventually fell into disuse, but have become a tourist attraction in recent decades.
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[edit] History
Seattle's first buildings were wooden. In 1889, 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, and the Great Seattle Fire ended up destroying 33 city 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. First, they ordered that all rebuilding use stone or brick—insurance against a similar disaster in the future. They also decided to take advantage of the destruction 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 didn't back up during high tide in Elliott Bay.
To regrade, the streets were lined with concrete walls which formed narrow alleyways between the walls and the buildings on either side of the street, and 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", effectively raising the streets to the desired new level, generally twelve feet higher than before, though some places were nearly thirty feet.
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. Skylights with small panes of clear glass, (which later turned to amethyst-colored because of phosphorus in the glass), were installed, creating the area now called the Seattle Underground.
When they reconstructed their buildings, merchants and landlords knew that it would just be a matter of time before what was originally the ground floor would be underground, and what was originally the next floor up would be the new ground floor. As a result, 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.
In 1907 the city condemned the Underground for fear of bubonic plague, two years before the 1909 World Fair in Seattle (Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition). The basements were left to deteriorate or were used as storage. In some cases, they 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 general public on guided tours.
[edit] Seattle Underground Tour
In 1965, local citizen Bill Speidel realized there might be interest (and profit) in the subterranean ruins. He established "Bill Speidel's Underground Tour," and took paying customers on a tour of what was left underneath Pioneer Square, paying rent to the building owners for the privilege of doing so. He also peppered his tour patter with tall tales from Seattle's history (some more factual than others), giving the tour an amusing counterculture feel that made it an "underground" tour in every sense of the word.
Over the years, the tour has become more popular, and the underground structures have been steadily refurbished to be more visually appealing. The tour remains a popular attraction for visitors and locals alike.
In 2004, the Underground Tour organizers began the adults-only Underworld Tour, a version of the Underground Tour that incorporates discussions of prostitution, the opium trade, and other less family-friendly elements of Seattle's early history.
[edit] Gallery
 A former bank; the vault door is in the background on the right |
 Brick arches provide the ceiling for the underground corridors and support the hollow street sidewalks |
 A doorway and windows formerly at street level |
[edit] See also
- Shanghai tunnels: similar structures in Portland, Oregon
[edit] In fiction
- The Art of Deception, Ridley Pearson
- Terry Pratchett has cited Seattle as one of the influences in his decision to give Ankh-Morpork its own Underground.
- A Knight of the Word and Armaggedon's Children Terry Brooks
- "Futurama" Where New York lies beneath New New York
- "Pike Place" (2007 novel) writes about Seattle Underground (in 1972)
[edit] In Films and TV
- The Underground was featured as the setting of the 1973 TV movie The Night Strangler, although the set designers decided to create a much more photogenic version on a Hollywood sound stage.
- An episode of the TV show Scooby-Doo featured the Seattle Underground.
- Issue 75 of the first volume of the comic book Green Arrow features the Seattle Underground as a setting.
- Featured on Ghost Hunters on the Sci-Fi channel, Season 3 Episode 'Lost Souls' 2007.
- The 1999 Robert Ryan novel Underdogs is set in the Seattle Underground.
[edit] External links
[edit] Recommended Reading
- Bill Speidels:
- Doc Maynard, The Man Who Invented Seattle. 1978, USA: Nettle Creek. ISBN 0-914890-02-6.
- Sons of the Profits. 1990, USA: Nettle Creek. ISBN 0-914890-06-9.
