A Bit of History

The other day I went on a tour of Underground Seattle - the tour tells the story of the historic downtown area of Seattle and how toilets and a fire made a huge impact on Seattle as we know it!

Back when Seattle was first developed it was picked for its handy location - close to the sea, close to rivers - good for growing crops. However, the business part of town was basically built right on the beach, in fact, when it was high tide the water would puddle up on the street! It meant they had huge problems with their toilets because the waste couldn't easily escape, they couldn't have long drops because it would fill up with sea water! So they installed flush toilets, all hooked into one sewer pipe that headed out to sea. Anyone who built a house would simply hook up their toilet to the one sewer line - it put a lot of pressure on the pipe, and to make matters worse, the main residential part of the city was up a very steep hill, so gravity brought their sewage down that one pipe with massive speed, sending it right out to sea. The problem was that sea water was coming in the pipe from the other end as well, making the pressure so enormous that at high tides raw sewage would spurt up through the toilets in 4-10 foot geysers!!! Can you even imagine? You head in to the toilet and suddenly out of the toilet erupts this force of raw sewage! I don't dare imagine what the clean up would have been like. So anyway, there were massive problems in the emerging new Seattle because of it being built on the beach (even the Bible warns against building houses on sand haha).

You can see the water puddles on the street in this photo! Fascinating!

They tried to put the toilets up on plinths but it didn't help

Meanwhile, there were some people boiling glue on a stove, they left it too long and it caught fire, unfortunately they threw water on the fire which spread it and because of a high wind and the fact that all the shops in town were made of timber, the whole downtown burned to the ground in 12 hours! Not one person died but over 30 entire blocks of shops were destroyed. It was awful, but did have a good outcome, it meant that the town could rebuild and in the process, fix their toilet problem! The shops began building straight away, in beautiful brick and stone this time, while the city planners decided what to do. It was an ingenious idea - they needed to raise the level of the road, but since people had already rebuilt their businesses they had to work around them, so they built huge retaining walls on each side of the road, leaving room for the sidewalk and shop fronts, and filled in the roads with dirt - are you with me? do you understand? the sidewalk was still usable, but they were basically filling in the street and burying it underground. They raised the road until it was level with the second storey of every building, so the buildings made new entrances on their second floor, while the first floor became their basement. The city built sidewalks to link the buildings to the roads with stairs and ladders to get to the underground sidewalks, so people could actively shop above ground and below ground! They even put skylights in the above ground sidewalks to light the underground sidewalk, incredible! We got to see the skylights, and they still let in a lot of light today all these years later!

The sidewalk and shop fronts beneath the ground!

The street level today

The skylights in the pavement looking from above ground

The skylights from the underground sidewalk - lots of light! 

As time went on, the underground sidewalks became infested with rats (they were so bad in some places they were described as a carpet) so people closed them off and just used the street level sidewalk. This tour I took allowed us to see some of these underground sidewalks and shop fronts (some are still in use!) It was fascinating, and sometimes mind boggling to imagine how they just filled in the streets to raise the road level! I wonder what it was like for the people who were around at that time.

Beautiful brick buildings and sidewalk with no rats!

I guess toilets are pretty famous in this town! This one was on display at the tour giftshop

I love learning about fascinating history and this tour was excellent! They also talked about how Seattle downtown was just full of gambling dens and taverns and women (affectionately termed "seamstresses"). Who knew Seattle had such an interesting story to tell!