Seattle, Part III: Underground Tour

From Dave Brigham:

This is the third post in a five-part series about Seattle, a beautiful and fun city I visited with my wife and kids back in April. This series is by no means meant to be an exhaustive survey of the Emerald City. It just features a lot of the stuff I saw while annoying my family by taking so many pictures. For links to the two previous installments, see the bottom of this post.

You don't wanna know how many times I sang this song to myself during the course of my 75-minute subterranean jaunt in Seattle. While researching our family trip, I stumbled across Bill Speidel's Underground Tour and I was sold instantly by the web site's tag line: "It’s the only way to tour the interconnecting tunnels of the world-famous Seattle Underground - don't be fooled by impostors!"

I managed to convince my wife and kids to go on this tour, which was a victory in and of itself. We arrived in Pioneer Square a bit early (part four of this series will cover the amazing architecture, ghost signs and restored neon from this old section of the city), so we walked around for a while. I spied this staircase and hoped it would figure into our tour.

Spoiler alert: it didn't.

At the appointed time we gathered inside the amazing Pioneer Building, a "Richardsonian Romanesque stone, red brick, terra cotta, and cast iron building" that was completed in 1892, per Wikipedia.

This fantastic building, like so many others in Pioneer Square, was built after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. The fire was started due to "an accidentally overturned glue pot in a carpentry shop," per Wikipedia, eventually torching 25 city blocks, including four wharves, the entire business district and its railroad terminals, sez Wikipedia.

While rebuilding the district, the city erected "retaining walls, eight feet or higher, on either side of the old streets, filled in the space between the walls, and paved over the fill to effectively raise the streets, making them one story higher than the old sidewalks that still ran alongside them," per the Underground Tour web site. Building owners, "eager to capitalize on an 1890s economic boom, quickly rebuilt on the old, low, muddy ground where they had been before, unmindful of the fact that their first floor display windows and lobbies soon would become basements. Eventually, sidewalks bridged the gap between the new streets and the second story of buildings, leaving hollow tunnels (as high as 35 feet in some places) between the old and new sidewalks, and creating the passageways of today’s Underground."

So after getting the tour spiel about how we should really, really, really go to the bathroom before going underground, these tunnels are where we started our exploration.

Our tour guide was a short fellow with a booming voice, a corny sense of humor and a great storytelling style. Unfortunately, all these months later I can't remember any of his best lines (or even his worst ones) but trust me he was a master of bad puns, exaggerated tales of woe and actual history (such as the story about how "seamstresses" -- aka working girls -- helped bring in enough money from loggers, sailors and other laborers that their madame was able to finance significant infrastructure that helped the city grow).

Unfortunately, I didn't get enough specific information about some of the things we saw. Or maybe I have just forgotten.

(Is this sign for the Northern Hotel vintage? Is this the original location of the sign?)

(Obviously, this sign for the South End Steam Baths wasn't around in the 1890s, or any time prior to the 1950s, I'm guessing. From what little I've found online, the steam baths were a gay hangout. Why is this sign just randomly placed along the underground tour?)

(This sign for "Sam's" looks like it was pretty cool in its heyday, which, again was probably in the latter half of the 20th century. Why is it down here? What was it for? A restaurant? Nightclub? Ice cream parlor?)

(This is a teller's cage. I assume this sign was from a bank, but again I wonder: is this vintage? It just looks like something some guy made back in the 1970s in high school shop class.)

(The Oriental Hotel was evidently popular with the above-referenced "seamstresses" of Pioneer Square, according to this post from The Ghost in My Machine blog. I'll assume the sign is real, although the paneling on the walls looks suspiciously like my family's rec room from the 1970s.)

(These pavement lights are real. We walked over them on the sidewalk above before and during the tour and I wondered what the heck they were. As our wacky guide explained, these glass tiles were one way of bringing light into the underground when businesses were active under there.)

(I don't recall what our guide said this massive wooden case was used for. Storing food or beer or whips & chains for the seamstresses, I suppose.)

(Where did this plush circular banquette come from? Why has it been thrown randomly into the underground? Did any famous people ever sit on it? Did the seamstresses do some of their "work" here?)

(I hate to keep harping on this, but what's the story with these sinks? How old are they? Where did they come from? Does Restoration Hardware sell reproductions?)

Here are the links to the previous two posts: September 10, 2019, "Seattle, Part II: Discovery Park," and September 1, 2019, "Seattle, Part I: Pike Place Market."

Make sure to come back soon for the fourth part of this series, which will cover the aboveground portion of Pioneer Square.