What Lies Beneath...

As I lay sprawled on my hotel room floor blow-drying my walking shoes, I do not believe that Seattle is only the 44th rainiest city in the country.  Winter has come to the Pacific Northwest, forcing me to search out rarely used scarves and mittens in a feeble attempt at keeping my Texas blood warm.  For the last tour of the season, of course.

I had vowed to make the most of my last trip, despite Arctic conditions, and it was for such purpose that I volunteered to take my small group around The Emerald City.  We visited the usual:  Space Needle, Pike Place Market, and Pacific Science Center.  The latter was celebrating its 50th Anniversary with a raffle for lifetime membership, which of course I entered.  And lost.

I then suggested a tour of the Seattle Underground, something I had been wanting to do but had yet to find the time.  My group agreed, possibly because I neglected to mention it included bathroom humor, rat-infestations, and the Bubonic Plague.

I was just happy to be out of the rain.  Although sloshing through the streets of Seattle was an appropriate way to begin, given that the city started out as a town built at sea level with streets made of sawdust that regularly flooded with sea water and sewage.  The tide was a twice daily answer to the settlers’ original question as to why the Native Americans had left such prime waterfront real estate vacant.

My group was happy, too.  Probably because they had opted for a lunch of Hennessey instead of a sandwich.  They remained some of the happiest people I have ever traveled with for the rest of the tour, proving that alcohol isn’t always a depressant, especially when consumed socially before noon.  They were from the Virgin Islands.

The chipper and overenthusiastic tour guide led us underground, obviously, but not before giving us an extensive history of Seattle’s plumbing woes.  The town’s 1000 outhouses were emptied twice a day with the coming of the tide.  Self-cleaning toilets, how terribly…modern?  The head plumber from England, by the name of Thomas Crapper, came to help out and forever lend his name to the popular American slang for toilet.  He brought in porcelain bowls, built a makeshift sewage system, and left Seattleites with the interesting dilemma of toilets that created an Ole Faithful of human waste if flushed at the wrong time of day.  The newspapers began printing the tide charts to help locals schedule their bowel movements.

All of this was not what my group was expecting, and we had yet to descend underground.  Fortunately there were no remains of this…crappy part of Seattle’s past for us to view.  Not so fortunately, this was because the entire town had burned to the ground, courtesy of a careless carpenter who had never learned how to properly extinguish a grease fire.  Or maybe he was just tired of exploding toilets.

Either way, the carpenter can share the blame with the unfortunate coincidence that aside from the large amount of wood and turpentine in his cabinet shop, the store above his was a paint store.  Also a very flammable substance.  His neighboring building had been empty until the day before said fire, when they filled it with barrel upon barrel of fine whiskey.

Did I mention their Fire Chief was also out of town on business?  At a meeting in San Francisco learning new firefighting skills…you know, in case your city ever catches fire.  The volunteer fire department also ran into another snag when they realized that building water lines out of wood wasn’t such a great idea.  So Seattle burned to the ground.

The city planners took this misfortune as an opportunity to fix the plumbing problem, informing local businesses it would only take 7 to 10 years to raise the city.  Only.  So the businesses disregarded the city’s plan and rebuilt at the original sea level, while the city moved an amount of dirt greater than that used in the digging of the Panama Canal to raise the roads and sewage system 15 to 30-feet.

Soon shopping in Seattle became a triathlon event.  Walk out of store onto sidewalk, stroll to nearest considerately installed wooden ladder, climb 20-feet.  Cross street, climb down ladder on opposite side, heaven help you if you bought an iron stove.

Years later the businesses and the city agreed to split the cost to raise the sidewalks, and everyone’s second or third story became their street entrance.  The ‘Underground’ stayed in use until people started dying of the Bubonic Plague in the early 1900s.  Turns out having millions of rats living beneath your city was about as great of an idea as building the town level with the tides.

Although many a Prohibitionist rumrunner used it to their advantage in the 1930s, the Seattle Underground remains out of use to this day.  Now the only things moving around beneath the city of Seattle are tourists.  Quite a few of them too…