With our girls sleeping over at a friends house, it was a relaxed and easy going morning involving pastries, copious amounts of coffee and a discussion about what we should do while we were waiting for them to come back into the city. When the Underground Tour popped up as having space for us on their first tour of the day, we quickly decided that this was the perfect way to spend a few hours.
There is a very interesting story to how Seattle was founded way back in the mid-1800's but it is long and I don't have time for it all here so here is a short version - One man came in, saw the land and said, this is a great place to build my city. So he did. But he didn't realize he built it upon shaky (or perhaps soggy ground) so for many years Seattle was at the mercy of the tidewaters rise and fall, in more ways than one. The whole city was sitting on the Puget Sounds seepage and the part that were on a bit higher elevation were soaked by the rainfall that the city is still known for today. The whole place was a muddy mess. The owner of the sawmill had a brilliant idea - we will take the sawdust from the factory floor and use it to soak up the mud and water and fill in the potholes along the streets. So now the streets are a muddy, soggy, sawdust filled mess. Not only that but when the water closet became popular a few years later, most of Seattle installed the new-fangled indoor toilets. The only problem was that the sewage system they had put underground to carry the waste out to the Sound was not a one-way system as it should have been. Nope, twice a day, when the tide came in it pushed all of that sewage back up the pipes turning the toilets into fountains spewing, well, sewage. Thankfully, the entire town burned to the ground in 1889. In one fell swoop, the town had rid itself of all of the ramshackle buildings and poor planning that it has built itself on in the first place. Time to start over!
Rebuilding began right way but this time they had experience on their side. Instead of building in wood, they built everything of brick and rock. Instead of being a slave to the tide that flooded the streets each day, they decided to build one story above ground, on top of the ruins that remained. Store owners were told that in a few years the sidewalks and streets would be where their second story windows now sat so they needed to take that into consideration as they planned. The first story would all be underground soon so builders left those unadorned and just functional while the second story (which would soon be ground level) had adorned doors and windows. It must have been a strange sight for awhile.
And this is how Seattle got an Underground. Totally by accident.
A photograph of the original wooden built Pioneer Square before it burned.
Plan drawing of how the first floor would be underground and the second story would become the first. Notice in the middle the two-way sewage they would be putting in. Also, notice that there is no way to get from one business to the next before that road is completed - both sides were just huge ditches. You had to use a ladder to climb out of your side of the ditch and then climb back down on the other side. Can you see the problem in a drinking kind of town?
During construction.
Enjoying the stories. This one was a bit racy and told about the "seamstresses" that made the town the most profitable in the NorthWest. There seemed to be a lot of men getting "laundry" done back then.
A photo of some of the most famous "seamstresses"
You see these all over the sidewalks in Pioneer Square.
This is that same photo taken from the Underground. This is how you know that there is an old business just under your feet.
In this case it was a bank vault and teller's cage.
One of the original "fountain" toilets.
Tour over we were back out in the sunshine and just waiting to grab some lunch once the kids were brought back to town. We killed some time reading about the Smith Tower - the tallest building outside of New York when it was built in 1914. It also housed the offices of Smith-Corona. We didn't tour it because the kids were back and it was lunchtime.
Lunch with Friends!
With 5 kids in tow what else do you do after lunch except take a ride in the Great Wheel...
And then head out for gelato.
We called it an afternoon at this point and we said a sad farewell to friends that we are not sure when we will see again. But, we relished in the fact that we had been able to spend these 24 hours together.
We finished up the day with dinner and an early bedtime. This vacationing was making us all a bit exhausted and B had an early flight in the morning. The rest of us had one more day to explore.
