Here.

I believe Seattle is now my favorite city in the U.S. Wouldn’t mind living here someday. Great climate. Friendly people. Lots of culture. The best open-air market I’ve ever visited. And you have beach, water, mountains, city, snow, and countryside an hour or two from downtown.

The undergroundish pictures are part of a very cool bit of Seattle history.

Apparently, the original city was built on a hillside, which made sewage a problem at high tide — geysers of raw sewage three to ten feet high would routinely erupt from Seattleite toilets. After a thirty-plus block of the city burned in a fire in 1889, the city thought it would be a good time to solve the problem — by bringing dirt down from the mountains, and elevating the entire city. Given that the project would take about ten years, during which very little else would get done in the city, business leaders balked. But with a big tax base and East Coast investment, the city went ahead with the plan anyway, but confined it to property owned by the city. It amounted to a battle of wills.

So you had this bizarre scenario where the city imposed 10 to 30 foot retaining walls along the sides of city streets, then filled in the walls with dirt, gravel, and cement, lifting the city streets into the sky. The streets towered over the sidewalks. Each corner apparently had a ladder you had to climb to get from sidewalk level to street level. This of course created huge problems (it’s not ADA-compliant!). People regularly fell off the street to their deaths. Sometimes horses fell down to the sidewalks, as — regularly — did horse waste. In fact, any number of items might topple off the street onto the sidewalks and pedestrians below.

So after the project was completed, business owners got together and installed i-beams to connect the street to their buildings (generally at the top of the first story). They then built brick arches across the opening, effectively creating enclosed sidewalks, though a full story below. That also had the effect of raising the entire city one story. Street-level stories were now basements. Second stories became first stories, and so on.

For a while, people still treated the now-underground story as a kind of street level for pedestrians. They put thick, glass skylights in the brick arches to allow in light for shopping the “storefronts.” Our guide told us that one amusing side-effect of this development is that the skylights served as a kind of built-in advertising mechanism for prostitutes. They’d linger over the skylights in flowing gowns, allowing the men below to, um, “inspect the goods.” They’d also typically print their rates on the bottoms of their shoes.

Over time, the new “street level” became the norm, and those covered sidewalks and old storefronts were abandoend.

A local newspaper columnist rediscovered the passages in the 1960s, and began to write about them. Miracllously, he was able to secure rights from the business owners, the city, and find an insurance company willing to underwrite the idea of a walking tour (Lloyd’s of London was the only insurer that would bite). In the forty years since, Pioneer Square has been rejuvenated from slum to trendy tourist stop.

It’s pretty damned fascinating. The tour guides are witty and knowledgeable — even a little bawdy.

The bar pictures are from F.X. McRrory’s Whiksey Bar, a large restaurant-tavern near and dear to my heart because (a) it boasts the largest collection of bourbon in the world, and (b) it’s the subject of this LeRoy Nieman painting, which hangs in my living room.

I’m off to Anchorage now, then to Kodiak Island, Alaska this evening.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Photo Blogging, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.