Seattle’s illustrious beginning

One of the other things Floyd and I did while we were downtown last Friday was visit Seattle’s underground. It’s a little embarrassing, but toilets figure prominently in our city’s history, making it what it is today.

Imagine if you will the idea of outhouses in the 1800s that drained into a tide flat. The twice-a-day consequences would be quite smelly. Modern “crappers” arrived in Seattle a few years after they were introduced in Europe, but no one predicted the resulting geysers due to back pressure on the sewage system. Seattle needed better drainage.

Fortunately after eight years relying on the tidetables to plan their day, a carpenter named John Black accidentally let his glue pot boil over then tried and smother the flames with sawdust and water. The devastating fire that resulted burnt the city to the ground in just over 12 hours, allowing everyone to start over.

This was part of Seattle’s original water supply system. Is it any wonder why we lost water pressure during the fire?

City officials decided to raise the city by 10-32 feet, but they couldn’t prevent shop owners from rebuilding immediately. They asked everyone to build out of brick, naturally, and make their buildings at least two stories high. Over the next 8 years, they built retaining walls around the sidewalks and filled in the streets.

This being Seattle, of course, the project didn’t get completed correctly or on time. By the time the city had finished the streets, they ran out of money for sidewalks connecting the streets to the second story of each building. Their solution? Place ladders at every intersection. If you wanted to cross the street, you needed to climb 10-32 feet onto the street, cross and climb down again. This went on for two years!

In addition, the city didn’t monitor the fill dirt very well. Turns out people were throwing dead animals and other organic debris into the streets. When these things started to decompose, they caused huge sink holes. It would make sense to fix the holes rather quickly, but Seattle took another tack - they named them and put them on the map. (Are you starting to figure out where the city’s tendency toward back asswards public works projects comes from?)

Eventually the city had enough money to make sidewalks and voila! we had an “underground.” It remained a thriving place of business for years before eventually falling into disuse.

An original skylight to provide light.

In the last 20 years or so, building owners have started to see the value in the extra real estate, so they’re using it again for storage.

There’s a lot of junk down there, including the remnents of Seattle’s first elevator.

You can even buy the junk if you want.

And that’s all she wrote.

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