Seattle Underground: The City Buried After the Great Fire of 1889, Washington

In its early years, Seattle had a drainage problem. Much of what's now Pioneer Square was built on filled-in tidelands, and the low ground often flooded. The town was also mostly wood. On the afternoon of June 6, 1889, a glue pot in a carpentry shop caught fire. The flames spread through the wooden buildings, and by the next morning the Great Seattle Fire had destroyed the city's entire central business district, about 25 blocks. Seattle rebuilt fast, and it rebuilt differently. New buildings in the burned district had to be made of brick and stone. And the city decided to fix its flooding problem by raising the streets. It didn't raise the buildings, though. Property owners rebuilt right away at the old ground level. Meanwhile, the city built concrete walls along the edges of the streets, then filled in between them with earth washed down from the steep hillsides. The new streets ended up one to two stories higher than before, generally about 12 feet, and in some places nearly 30 feet. For a while, Seattle had two levels. The new streets ran high above, while the old sidewalks and shop entrances sat down below in front of the buildings. Pedestrians climbed ladders to get between them. Eventually the gaps were covered over with new sidewalks, set with small glass skylights so daylight could reach the walkways beneath. Many of those glass panes later turned purple in the sun. The old ground floors became basements, and the buried sidewalks became an underground world of storefronts and passageways. In 1907, the city condemned the underground, out of fear of the bubonic plague. The spaces didn't go entirely unused afterward; some were later used for illegal businesses. For decades, most people forgot about them. That changed in the 1960s, thanks to a Seattle newspaper columnist and preservationist named Bill Speidel. He had already been cleaning out sections of the underground, and in May 1965, he led tours as part of a civic "Know Your Seattle Day." Five hundred people paid a dollar each. Bill Speidel's Underground Tour has been running ever since, and in 2013 a second company, Beneath the Streets, began leading tours of other sections. Today, visitors still walk past those buried storefronts and look up at the old glass skylights, now covered by the sidewalks of present-day Pioneer Square.