This past Tuesday was Eric’s 24th birthday. I wanted him to think of something he’s always wanted to do but never had the chance, so he decided on the Seattle Underground Tour. This tour is not something you’d want to bring young kids on, not because it’s terribly inappropriate, but because they’d probably be bored. At the end of our tour, the parents of a couple kids in our group asked how they liked it. They replied “Too much history!” But for us, that made it extremely interesting. It’s not really all that to look at, no skeletons or anything like that, just old musty ruins. But the history and stories were fascinating.
Probably the coolest thing was learning about the engineering feat to build the ground a story higher than it originally was. This is a picture of what used to be the first story of some Seattle shops, we were standing on the original sidewalks.
What’s interesting, is after the fire the destroyed Seattle, the city shop owners refused to wait (for years) until the streets were built a story higher. They went ahead and rebuilt their shops. So once the streets were built, shoppers had to climb ladders from the street to the sidewalk and back up again. If you wanted to cross the street, you had to climb up a ladder, cross, and climb down another one! This was bad for drunks heading home from the bar, and for pedestrians down below when freight fell off of trucks above. After several deaths, the owners decided it was time for the sidewalks to move up as well.
Basically bridges were built between the road and the buildings, then the bridges were connected and paved over to make sidewalks. It’s really quite impressive. The second story of the buildings, became the ground floor, and the first story became an unused basement. The area under the sidewalks was never filled in, and created the tunnels. There are some skylights in the tunnels, here’s an inside view of one.
It’s one of the few that’s also visible from above ground. Most have been paved over because they weren’t safe.
All in all, we had a great time and really enjoyed it. If you haven’t tried it, it’s worth the $14. Just make sure to get there half an hour early (we were surprised by how full it was) and bring cash (no checks or credit cards accepted). Enjoy checking out the old toilets and bathtubs!
