Travel: Seattle Underground Tour: Homemade Adventures

Hi, welcome to Homemade Adventures. I'm Charlie. Today we're going to talk to you about the Bill Spiedel's Underground Tour in Historic Pioneer Square. Pioneer Square became the first in the history of the city to make it onto the National Register of Historic Places. Tickets are about $22 a piece per adult. I'll post the link down below. I cannot speak for all of the tour guides, but Adrienne was excellent. She did incredibly cheesy jokes and she had unbelievable delivery of Seattle history. I would give her a solid 4 out of 5. We wanted to share our experience with you in this video. This video is only a short preview of what you can have if you actually visit the Underground Tour in Seattle. The full tour is approximately 70 minutes long. And don't forget to check out us on Facebook. We have a new postcard tribe where we send postcards to each other from around the world. That can be found at facebook.com slash groups slash postadventures. If you like this video be sure to hit the subscribe button and click the bell to be notified when we upload new adventures. And we named that street Yes-A-Way after Henry Yes-A-Way because his mill was on it. But it also had a different name back in the day. We called it Skid Road because we would literally skid logs down that road to get to the sawmill. Then eventually Skid Road took on a different meaning. Yeah, that street, it was the dividing line between the good part of town up there and the bad part of town down here. And the bad part of town was pretty bad. Lots of gambling and liquor and fights and crime and murder. The fun part of town. But a journalist came and he saw how rough our neighborhood was here so he wrote a scathing article all about how terrible Seattle is and how you should never come here. And he put that term Skid Road in that article. And that is how the rest of the world started to call their rough sketchy neighborhood Skid Road or Skid Row. But Seattle is the first with that meaning. And we are very proud. Now we are headed down these stairs behind me. And the cabinetmaker's apprentice, he was a young man from Sweden. His name was Jan Bach. And that day Jan was melting some glue in a small pot over a gasoline stove. Well he wasn't watching the glue and it melted and it boiled over and it caught fire. And glue in the 1800s, it came from animal parts. Including their fat. So it was a grease fire. What is the last thing that you throw at a grease fire? Water. Water, yeah. So unfortunately water was the first thing that Jan Bach threw on it. And flaming gobs of glue splattered everywhere. It's a cabinetmaker's shop. There's wood everywhere. Wood shavings. Rags soaked in turpentine. So within seconds, everything's on fire. Those guys got to run for their lives. And then the fire spreads upstairs. To the paint store. It's a particularly flammable building in a town full of flammable buildings. But then it got tragic. Because next door to the original building was a liquor warehouse. We lost 500 barrels of whiskey. It just exploded. It's the saddest loss of the whole fire. But then down the street, there were two hardware stores. And hardware stores, the frontier town, they had ammunition and dynamite in them. These two, they had about 20 to 30 tons of ammunition and dynamite apiece. So they exploded for about 20 to 30 minutes apiece. People, they later described it as the 4th of July come early. Never feared. We did have firemen. Unfortunately, we only had one paid professional fireman who knew what he was doing. He was our fire chief. And he was out of town. So the rest of our firemen, they were volunteers. And they had fought fires before. They had just never fought fires with our brand new fire hydrants. And we had gotten our brand new fire hydrants from Henry Yesler. You might want to try those out before an emergency. And it turns out that after about 10 minutes, that water pressure dropped to nothing. Firemen were never able to get it back. So they relied on bucket brigades and draping wet blankets over building sites. It is not very effective. But by 6 p.m. that evening, it was quite clear to everyone in town, the firemen were not going to be able to put out the fire. So they were heckling them. They laid down their equipment, they climbed the hill to the east, and they watched the city burn with everyone else. Because no one could put the fire out. Our fire decided to put itself out. It was around 3 a.m. the next morning. It hit some tide flats south of where Safeco Field Baseball Stadium now stands. And it sizzled out. But in the 12 hours that it burned, it took over 100 acres with it. Imagine our downtown area, from where the big white Ferris wheel is on the waterfront all the way to the sports stadiums, burned clean. But no one died. And you know, it turned out to be a good thing because we could rebuild Seattle literally from the ashes. Now, as we go along on our tour, you're going to notice a lot of debris to the sides. And that was down here when we started doing our tours. Yeah, because these underground spaces, they belong to the buildings that they're next to. They can do with it whatever they want. Whoever owned the areas we're going to see today on our tour, they just kind of put stuff they didn't need anymore. But it is historic stuff they didn't need anymore and therefore it is awesome. So, enjoy! There's like bed springs and part of a broken crapper over here. Alright, so hopefully you've noticed our beautiful purple glass up there. That is skylight. When we rebuilt after the fire, a lot of business owners put the skylight into their sidewalk to be able to see down in their underground spaces. These were actually every 10 feet or so at one time. The glass was actually originally clear. They mixed it with manganese to keep it from turning green or brown over time. And then after decades exposure to sunlight, the manganese in the glass turned it purple. So, anytime you're in Seattle and you see that purple glass under your feet, you're standing on a skylight put in after the great fire. And there's underground space under you. So, you know, tread softly and respectfully on the historic glass. It's kind of loud when people walk on it, especially if they roll their luggage. And if it breaks, it's irreplaceable. So, please be kind to our historic glass. So, now I'm actually going to tell you about how we rebuilt after the fire and why on earth we built it like this. There was actually a town meeting the day after the fire and everyone agreed. Okay, no more buildings made out of wood. Wood catches fire. Fire is bad. And the business owners who lost everything in the fire, they are not going to wait a decade for the city to raise the streets and then build on top of that. So, the city allowed the businesses to build at the original Seattle street level. Just knowing that the city was still going to raise the streets, they would just do it around them. Yeah. And so the business owners knew that their first floor would eventually be underground and their second or third floor would then become the main entrance. This is why the original first floors of these buildings are very plain. They're just brick. They're just stone. There's nothing fancy about them. And then the city starts to put up these two very tall retaining walls on either side of each street and then around each block of buildings that was going up. And in between those two retaining walls they just put all sorts of things to spill including more sawdust from yesterday's sawmill. Such a good idea. They took debris from our fire. They took random objects that were just kind of lying around. In the years since, we have found a rowboat, a cello, some typewriters, horse carcasses, and perhaps the creepiest of all, thousands of doll eyes. Most of the fillet was dirt so we had those steep cliffs to the east that I was talking about earlier. They were actually a 49 degree grade. That is really steep. So we wanted them less steep. We wanted that dirt as fill. We sort of washed part of the hillside down in a method called hydraulic sluicing and now those hills are about an 18 degree grade. Much more manageable. Now in the middle of all that weird random dirt doll eye fill that's where we stuck our new sewer. It was super steep and super big. It could accommodate the whole town. And then on top of all that, that's where we put our new streets which are 10 to 32 feet higher than the original Seattle street level depending on what area of town you're in and how steep the sewer needed to be there. So here we got original Seattle street level a building rebuilt at that level and then the city raised the street so part of that building is now underground only the city didn't actually put in any sidewalks. We had a street, a building and it gave me a home. Turns out sidewalks cost money and no one had any after the rebuild plus they couldn't agree who should actually pay for them, the city or the businesses and so for four years no one paid and we had no sidewalks so picture nothing above us right now but blue skies and you might wonder Adrienne, how does someone get in that building when the street is all the way up there? The city actually decided until we got our permanent sidewalks they would install temporary ladders at every intersection a rickety wooden ladder 10 to 32 feet high Tunnels, they are not interconnected, they only go around each block of buildings and in between each building in that block is a solid rock wall Now if you were in this area of town at that time and you wanted to go shopping, you wanted to see a lawyer you had to climb up and down the ladders. This is why we are climbing up and down stairs today but hey, we have it better than the people in the 1800s especially the ladies because they were wearing very long, very heavy dresses and skirts and it is not easy to climb up but ladies they managed it fine It is more the gentlemen that had the problem because we had a lot of saloons here in our Skid Row neighborhood and it is downright dangerous to climb on a ladder after you've been drinking a lot of those men, they just forgot that the street dropped off so they dropped off 17 inebriated men fell to their death We call that Seattle's One Step Program but eventually after about 4 years the city and the businesses, they split the cost of the sidewalk Behind you all and wrapping around behind me, those are our retaining walls so just picture thousands of doll eyes staring back at you from the other side of the stone and sweet dreams tonight Now out there at an angle that is Yesler Way Behind me at an angle this is First Avenue and that's the building behind you all which in current day is the Café d'Arte it's a delicious coffee shop This is Elmer Fisher's drawing of the corn building which you can see was completed in 1888 Unfortunately the year of the fire remember was 1889 The corn did not last long but then they rebuilt her and she looks a lot like the original drawing but they have added another story That fancy cornice is gone and then everything from here down is now underground So that door that we just came in up there at street level that was here in the drawing and then when we walk down the stairs you'll see that this first floor bank of windows in the drawing is over there in real life It's pretty crazy If we were the first corn building in 1888 we would be looking out at the street not at a retaining wall We might even see this guy and his horses That's the one that tried to put out the fire Ok so remember earlier when I said Seattle was mostly men Well at one point Seattle city officials they wanted to know exactly who lived here in Seattle They also wanted to know what work they did and how much money they made so that they'd know who to tax and that survey showed us that Seattle was 90% men That's a lot The odds were good ladies but the goods were odd Very odd Yes Now on this survey these working men were young they were loggers, they were mill workers and sailors and they didn't make very much money But the survey also showed that there was a group of around 2,500 women working here in the Skid Road area and they were making unbelievable amounts of money Yes Now on the survey they called their occupation seamstress Someone needs to do the sewing in a town with that many men Well besides its obvious benefits, sewing it also meant money for the city because these seamstresses they could be fined $2 per incident and there were a lot of sewing incidents The city made a lot of money that way And then in 1888 our favorite seamstress came to Seattle We actually consider her one of Seattle's founding mothers Her name was Madam Blue Graham As her title would imply, she ran a very successful sewing circle When she came to Seattle she went right to the men in charge and she told them of her plans to build a beautiful, elegant sewing establishment One that would cater to the top hat and tails crowd and one you could actually trust And then in exchange for them allowing Madam Blue to run her business uninterrupted these city officials would get free hem jobs Now Madam Blue also suggested a sewing tax Every month each seamstress would pay the city $10 Because there was so much sewing going on, that sewing tax accounted for 80% of the city's general fund That is a lot of money Now the sewing tax wasn't the only reason why we were able to rebuild after the fire Madam Blue, she also gave some personal loans to some of our business owners Because if they couldn't get a loan through the bank for whatever reason, but Madam Blue trusted them, she would loan them some of her own money so that they could rebuild And in this way she was responsible for erections all over town When she died in 1903, it is said that a quarter of a million dollars from Madam Blue's estate ended up going to the Seattle Public Schools That is a pretty big donation for 1903 Alright, follow me around the corner Like we are on the sidewalk Now Seattle, we had another great money maker here besides sewing, it was the Klondike Gold Rush Now obviously that took place up in the Yukon Territory of Canada But it did affect Seattle Because in July of 1897 the steamer ship Portland came down from Canada made off right here in Seattle and on board were 68 gold miners and over 2 tons of the gold that they had found out there And when that news broke in Seattle everyone lost their minds Our mayor quit that day to go up north and mine the gold So did most of the policemen and most of the firemen A young logger he was living in the area at the time And he decided it would be a great adventure to become a gold miner So he went to Canada Only there was an issue with whether or not he owned the mining claim that he was working on His horses died and he almost froze to death So he pretty much had the worst time ever He ended up selling that mining claim whether or not he actually owned it and came back to Seattle with the money He was like, forget gold I'm going to open a shoe store Don't sound very impressed You might be impressed to learn that that man was John Nordstrom Yes That is how he got his start And Nordstrom still sells awesome shoes Tradition continues But as John Nordstrom found out it is no joke to mine in the Yukon Very hard work Very rough conditions A lot of people were dying We are literally closer to Mexico than we are to the Yukon But apparently that didn't matter Because of the 100,000 people that went up to the Palmec 70,000 of them passed through Seattle And we sold the heck out of that one ton of supplies Mining equipment, warm clothing, food And then some other things Like sled dogs We didn't have sled dogs in Seattle We just had regular dogs It stopped no one A lot of mixed breed dog teams going up there with retrievers But it is because of all of the business done during the gold rush, legitimate or otherwise that Seattle went from making $365,000 a year to $25 million in about 8 months So we are fond of the gold rush And in fact the building behind you during the gold rush was a dry goods and meat market They stored some of their goods in the underground Right where we are going to walk around Look at the brick arches to your right You'll see the words rolled wheat, rolled barley and rice Which is where they stored those things Alright, follow me this way Rolled wheat and rolled barley Alright Now these tunnels down here They were condemned actually in 1907 And it is not because it is structurally unsafe down here, it was actually because of the bubonic plague Only a handful of people got it But you know, you don't mess around with the plague We had gotten a bit of a rat problem down in the underground Some areas were like a moving carpet of tails and eyes That could be gross depending on your point of view So the city They put a bounty on the rats You killed a rat, you brought in its tail as proof And then the city would pay you 10 cents Which worked great Until people started to breed the rats Mostly children I had a lot of fun with you guys today I hope you had fun with me Alright, thank you, let's head on out