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The Seattle Underground is a network of underground passageways and basements in downtown Seattle, Washington that was originally the area's ground level. After the streets were elevated, these spaces eventually fell into disuse, but have become a tourist attraction in recent decades.
History
On June 6, 1889, most of Seattle's central business district burned to the ground in the Great Seattle Fire.
It was decided to rebuild the city one to two stories higher than the original street grade, as Pioneer Square had been built mostly on filled-in tidelands and often flooded; in fact, a nine-year-old boy once drowned in a pothole in Commercial Street, now First Avenue South. The new street level also assisted in ensuring that gravity-assisted flush toilets didn't back up during high tide in Elliott Bay.
Several city blocks in the downtown region were enclosed with brick and timber barricades and the pavements between were raised. This left sidewalks and some storefronts as much as 36 feet below street level.
For a time, pedestrians climbed ladders to go between street level and building entrances, but eventually the building entrances were raised, and the old sidewalks covered over, creating the area now called the Seattle Underground. Merchants carried on business in the lowest floors of buildings that survived the fire, and pedestrians continued to use the underground sidewalks lit by 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 illegally became flophouses for the homeless, gambling halls, speakeasies, and opium dens.
Only a small part of the Seattle Underground has been restored and made safe and accessible to the general public. 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. It was also the setting for an episode of the TV show Scooby-Doo.
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, but it still takes a great deal of imagination and some skillful storytelling to look at rotting sub-flooring and get a real sense of what life was like in old Seattle. Regardless, it remains an extremely 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 savory and less family-friendly elements of Seattle's early history.
Gallery
In fiction
- The Art of Deception, Ridley Pearson
In TV
- The Night Strangler
External links
"Seattle Underground"