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Underground Seattle

© Rick Muenchow

America has had its share of natural disasters. The Great Chicago Fire took place in 1871. In 1906 an earthquake destroyed San Francisco. And of course all too often today we see on the Weather Channel the destruction that hurricanes and tornados can wreak.

Less well-known, perhaps, is the fact that Seattle had a fire, too, in 1889. Started by an overturned glue pot, the fire spread rapidly and a drop in water pressure soon overwhelmed the city's firefighters, ending in the destruction of 33 city blocks. Not an unusual event for that time. The reconstruction of those city blocks, however, followed a course that was most unusual.

In order to avoid flooding and sewage problems, city officials wanted to raise the levels of some of the streets to keep them away from nearby Elliott Bay, but the people in charge of reconstructing the buildings managed to outpace these plans. The result was that throughout much of the downtown area, many of the streets ended up being as high as 32 feet above the ground floors of the surrounding buildings and people literally had to use ladders to climb up or down to get across the street. To remedy these new problems, various bridges and sidewalks were eventually built, effectively burying the ground floors. Then, in the early 1900s, a plague hit and the entire area below the streets was condemned. The area thus became a prime venue for illegal activities such as bootlegging which thrived for many years with the old store fronts still intact.

Now at this point you may be thinking, Wow, underground store fronts? That would be something to see. Well, guess what? Bill Speidel's Underground Tour was designed with you in mind. This 90-minute romp will take you through some of those exact haunts and give you a taste of what life was like back then . . . and down there.

Your tour begins at Doc Maynard's Public House, a restored 1890s saloon located in Pioneer Square. (You'll recognize Pioneer Square by the 50-foot totem pole and the statue of the real pioneer, Chief Sealth, for whom the city was named.) Here your guide will meet you and give you an introduction to what life was like in Seattle during the 1800s. You'd best be warned: it wasn't pretty. Take a guess as to what city was home to the original Skid Row (Skid Road).

There were a lot of unsavory characters hanging around town in those days. One of the more colorful groups were the women known as seamstresses (we would call them prostitutes) who spent a lot of time helping gentlemen into and out of their clothing as any good seamstress would do. The Gold Rush of 1897-98 had a lot to do with Seattle developing a less than stellar reputation. With all the steamships going north, Seattle became a jumping off point to the Yukon River in Western Canada, and it was around this time that the town's population swelled.