Your feet now rest above Seattle's original street level. On June 6, 1889, a cabinet-maker's pot of glue boiled over on First Avenue and ignited a fire that burned for twelve hours, destroying twenty-five city blocks. The fire started in the worst possible location: a district built almost entirely of wood, during a long dry summer, with a water supply that failed almost immediately.
Rather than rebuild on the same flood-prone ground, city engineers raised the street level by ten to thirty-five feet. Buildings rose above the new grade, but for years the old lower stories remained accessible, creating an underground network of storefronts, saloons, and sidewalks beneath the rebuilt city. Bill Speidel rediscovered the underground in the 1960s and opened tours in 1965.
Walking beneath the current sidewalks, you move through the original 1889 street grid, past old brick storefronts and rusted iron columns, in a layer of the city that time buried but did not destroy. The underground is damp, strange, and oddly moving — the ghost of a city that burned, rebuilt, and walked away from its own foundations.