My mom and bro flew out last Sunday to celebrate Christmas with us and spend the week doing some serious Seattle touristing. Unfortunately it's been kinda cold (being winter and all) and rainy (also a problem in winter) but we've been braving the forces and freezing our tushies off out there. On Tuesday and Wednesday we shopped like crazy mad midwesterners. Then on Thursday we went downtown, did the Underground Tour, Pike's Place and the new public library. On Friday we checked out the neighborhood of Ballard with all it's georgeous shoreline views and fishing restaraunts (my bro got some fish and chips), and we went to the Ballard Locks. Today we went over to the East side and drove out into the country a bit to see some woods (all a bit messy still from the storm though).Although it has all been quite fun, the Underground Tour was for me the best part (although my mom thought it was a bit boring so maybe it's not for everyone). The tour gave a little history lesson on Seattle's birth in the late 1800s and then led a tour of the underground (original) downtown area. Seattle was first built at sea level, which didn't bode well for getting rid of sewage. After several failed attempts at pipelines, which all led to smelly explosions and stagnant poopy water, the city happened to burn down (unrelated to the sewage problem, more related to the problem of everything being built with wood). Businesses then rebuilt using brick, but the city insisted on raising up the streets so that sewage lines could properly be installed underneath them. The result: the sidewalks and businesses were about one story lower than the streets. This meant that people walked on sidewalks down below street level (and climbed ladders to get up and over the streets), which was a little dangerous (especially for the drunk), so eventually the sidewalks were enclosed and you had a choice of being above ground or going underground while doing your shopping. Eventually the underground was shut down due to an outbreak of the plague, and went unused until the 1960s when somebody had the bright idea of making some money off of giving tours. I thought hearing the history was pretty cool. The picture here is one from their website of a guy looking up at the glass windows that were built into the underground to let light in.
2 comments:
I learned about the whole underground thing in one of the crazy novels that I read. In this one a serial killer was hiding in the "old" part of Seattle that's underground. It was pretty spooky. The author was claimed (I'm not sure if this is true or not..but sounds real) that there are a ton of homeless people down there.
The areas that were part of the tour were locked up pretty tight (and cleaned out fairly well, considering). We didn't see any homeless people down there. But the whole downtown has this thing going on, and we only saw a couple blocks of it, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was being used elsewhere for other things. One thing they mentioned on the tour was that a lot of stores just used it for storage - so it's possible that it's still accessible in some places. I think it would be really freaky in the parts that weren't part of the tour - it would be smelly, probably poorly lit, and I would be totally freaked about ghosts. So a homeless person brave enough to endure all that is a pretty brave homeless person.
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