The Travel Trip

When I was a child, I lived about two hundred and forty miles east of Seattle, and some the best times I had as a child can be found on my family’s visits to this city.  I loved the ferries out to the islands and over to Vancouver Island.  I especially was fascinated by the Seattle Space Needle and the buildings left over from the World’s Fair, the fish markets, the harbors, all of this was especially attractive to a ten year old, normally confined in a town of less than three thousand people.  Literally, everywhere you went in my home town, people knew your name, and kept tabs on where you were going and why.  In Seattle, there was suddenly the freedom of a large city, with all the excitement and pace that the place demanded.

Once we arrived in town and booked ourselves into a hotel, Seattle was ours to explore.  And in all the times I managed to get there, there was one place I never managed to see, but always wanted to go: Seattle Underground.  I heard about it, of course, in pamphlets and brochures, so much that it became legendary in my mind.  Essentially, Underground Seattle consists of about three blocks that burnt in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889.  When the city rebuilt, they rebuilt over this area, creating an underground realm that were once the main roads and storefronts of 19th Century Seattle.

Today, you can take a tour of this underground area with a frank tour that provides a history lesson you may not have read in the history books as a child.  One tour begins in Doc Maynard’s Public House, a saloon restored from the 1890s, and then moves its guests through the Pioneer Square through three city blocks, ending as all tours seem to do, in a gift shop.

Underground Seattle exists because, after the fire that ate up the wooden buildings of the time, the city decided new buildings should be constructed of stone or brick.  At the same time, they raised the height of the buildings because the city was built mostly on tideflats, which were soggy and, when rains came, the mud would cover up anyone low to the ground, like dogs and kids.  Obviously, the city wanted to do something different this time, raising the city streets a full story higher than the old sidewalks, thus creating as a byproduct the underground portion of the city.  It’s a place I intend to see and tour the very next time I’m back in Seattle.

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1. New York’s Chelsea Market
2. San Antonio’s Mexican Food is Delicious
3. Moreton-in-Marsh and the Beauty of the Cotswolds
4. Malibu Disasters
5. Hand2Mouth: Portland Theater

Posted on December 14th, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Travel