the underground

hookers from the 1800's.  look closely one of them is a man

Last weekend while a friend from Los Angeles was visiting, we decided to go take the Seattle Underground tour.  It was not my first time taking the tour, I’d gone with my parents some twenty years earlier, which basically meant that it was my first time.

If you’re not familiar with the Seattle Underground, this is a very brief explanation:

Because Seattle had been built on the Duwamish river delta, it was originally mostly soggy marsh lands.  The early settlers had constant problems with flooding from the marshes and the Elliot Bay tides, which could swing as much as ten feet.  After the city burned down in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, architects were given a unique chance to rebuild the city from scratch, addressing the previous flooding problems.  Their solution was to raise the city above the flood levels, about ten feet.  Long story short, this created an underground city that was eventually abandoned.

If you wish to know more I suggest you go down to Pioneer Square and take the tour yourself.

After the tour was finished everyone seemed a little... disappointed is the wrong word, but if you were expecting to see some kind of incredible underworld city full of pale and dirty mole people you would leave sorely disappointed.  If you’ve ever gone into the crawl space of a house then essentially you’ve seen the Seattle Underground.  Perhaps the main reason to go is for the history lesson, and the tour guides bad humor.  If nothing else it serves as a public safety announcement that all of the old Pioneer Square buildings are being held up by little more than 120 year old moldy wood.

The next day I realized that this tour is the heart of Seattle, odd, quirky, full of toilet humor, hookers, and poorly thought out city planning (a Seattle institution).  The Yuppies have tried and failed over the decades to yuppify the city.  In the last ten years that movement has been strong and the gentrification of places like South Lake Union, the University District, and Capital Hill has turned these oddballs into condos, Starbucks, and Whole foods.

I do have hope however that the Undergrounds of Seattle will prevail and that eventually these Yuppie strongholds will fall.  Soon people in those condos will find themselves living above a peepshow, an artists colony, and a store full of taxidermied animals or Mummies and gag gifts.

Everyone still seemed at a loss for words to rationalize the $15 they spent on the tour.  I, on the other hand got it completely.  People don’t come to Seattle for the EMP or the Spaceneedle.  They come to hear a struggling actor spend an hour and a half talking about “crappers” from the 1800’s and pointing out dirt covered corridors where 100 years before hookers propositioned the geniuses who decided to build a city here in the first place.