Seattle is a beautiful, albeit frequently rainy city. Famous for its Pike Fish Market,
the Monorail gliding over the city thoroughfares, and even the famous Space Needle which appears
like some type of mid-century flying saucer as it rockets into the sky. But did you know that
beneath its bustling streets, lay a labyrinth of underground alleys lined with abandoned
storefronts and crumbling infrastructure? This is Seattle’s Underground.
The city was originally built on the mud flats along the banks of Puget Sound. Unfortunately,
high tides would flood the city and it became a rather big issue.
The city continued to grow, nevertheless, and something
needed to be done to make the streets safer and more reliable for navigating the town.
Originally, it was proposed that a nearby hill could be excavated and the soil used
to build a new city up higher off the ground, so that the businesses could still be near the
waterfront for the ease of exporting their goods and transporting people to and fro.
But the businesses did not like this idea because it would take over a decade to complete the new
and expensive project, and the shops couldn’t afford to wait that long. So instead the idea was
to build the streets themselves up higher. Stone walls were erected to frame the new streets, and
then they filled the space up to the new street level. The original sidewalks were left as they
were, and the area it occupied was enclosed by a roof made of steel beams supporting brick arches.
This type of structure now supports the city’s new elevated sidewalks.
Businesses were expected to either raise their buildings up higher, or in many cases, move their
shops and services to the second or third level of the building. So today when you enter some of
the historic buildings closer to the waterfront, you might actually be above the ground floor.
For the buildings that were raised up, often they chose to create a new basement,
and that is evident with these robust pylons that hold up the building. But for the other structures
that instead chose to repurpose their upper floors as the new ground-level business, they kept their
former lower levels as a basement. There was even a brief period of time when the true
ground-level businesses remained and pedestrians could enjoy shopping beneath the new streets,
where they were shielded from the rain and bitter cold. Over the decades of the early 20th century,
the underground was slowly abandoned and forgotten, to the point where some businesses
no longer even used their old basement levels, and instead boarded up the stair access to the bottom.
It is said that the underground was abandoned for about 5 decades before eventually,
some tourism businesses opened, taking visitors to sections of the underground they owned.
The Seattle Underground is really quite fascinating because as you walk through
these forgotten city streets, you can see real artifacts that were abandoned down
here nearly a century ago, sealed up beneath the sidewalks. You will even spot piles of rubble,
left down here from a fire that swept through the city during the regrading of the streets.
As we walk the old city streets, you can see areas like this where the street walls
are on one side of the walkway, and on the other are the old windows and doorways of
the ground floor businesses, which are now only active on the new streets above us.
In the 1950s and 60s, the city had to come down here and start doing maintenance to
the underground which is why sometimes you’ll see sections with concrete walls
and brand-new steel beams supporting the underside of the old ones. This was done
only out of necessity because perhaps that area was dangerously decayed and prone to collapse,
but as we go further, you’ll see areas that almost appear untouched.
In this area, you can see the stone walls of the street on our left,
but on our right is the abandoned ground floor level of a rather large building with a stone
masonry facade. In
places such as this, there is a large open area because perhaps we are walking through an alley
between two buildings or we are passing through the basement of another business.
At one point we climbed the stairs to get back to street level only to find
we were in the basement of an abandoned structure, which was really fascinating.
There are spots such as this one where on the left is the basement of a building still in use,
and to maintain privacy and security, the old storefront windows have new walls built into them.
And as we walk through, notice the crumbling infrastructure. There are
support poles and beams installed wherever the sidewalks above start to sag or buckle.
The repairs are often done by inserting a steel pole or lumber beam to assist the century-old
architecture, but there are very few places along the tour where modern engineering has
replaced the original design, and I believe that is done intentionally to maximize preservation.
As we continue along the original sidewalks, you might have noticed a lot of plumbing systems
surrounding us. These are all city utilities that have been installed over the decades,
some of them still in use, others left to rot along with the rest of the underground.
Now take a look at this glass skylight. There are a lot of these installed in the Seattle
Underground, this was done for that period of time when the ground floor businesses were
still in use, and pedestrians needed daylight to help them navigate the maze of masonry walls that
surrounded them. Of course, they were welcome to go up top, but perhaps their favorite shop hadn’t
moved up there yet. These glass skylights remain today and as you might have seen,
people walk over them, blissfully unaware of the creepy labyrinth beneath their feet.
This section of the underground was used later as the vaults of the bank up at ground level,
the bank would use the old city streets to move large sums of
money to and from the docks, even if the lobby above was closed for the evening.
Doing these operations below ground helped protect the money from thieves and the weather.
Now one thing I didn’t really film was how we crossed from one city block to the other.
You see, the city raised the streets up, but didn’t build tunnels that connected intersections
together. Therefore, when we needed to cross a street to get to the other side, we had to climb
stairs back up to street level, cross the street, then descend another set of stairs on the other
side, and this is exactly what citizens had to do back when the underground was still in operation.
In this area, we are entering a very broad street corner at an intersection. And we can see the
stone facade and front door to the business that used to exist here. It’s so eerie to think that at
one point you could look both directions and see blocks and blocks of cityscape, and sunlight or
rain could be hitting you as you went to enter the building, but over a century later, this street
corner has been entombed under the city. I was only able to show some of my tour,
and I only repeated to you a fraction of the full story. The tour I took was called Bill
Speidel’s Underground Tour, named after the late Seattle historian with a humorous candor.
Though there are a lot of stairs to climb, I highly recommend seeing the underground for
yourself, it’s like a crumbling time capsule of a bygone era. Thank you for watching, be
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