A curious feature of downtown Seattle is its underground, a collection of basement like areas below the streets, that include sidewalks and doorways. In places it looks like an older city got covered in an avalanche of road, and the inhabitants just accepted the new road levels. Speidel’s book, besides telling the story of early Seattle, centers on an account of how this underground city came to be. He claims that both sanitation (sewer backflow on high tides) and road layout of the downtown area left much to be desired, but attempts to widen and raise the roads met with fierce opposition by the downtown merchants and with legal and bureaucratic obstacles. When in June 1889 a big fire leveled all of downtown, the time had finally come, the city widened and filled in the roads over the following years, and the merchants rebuilt their houses from the ground level up, having to abandon these ground levels once the roads reached their final height and rebuild an entrance in a higher story. Both the books and the guided tours that Speidel’s company still provides in Seattle are a lot of fun – though I hear historians aren’t all too happy with his dramatizations, inaccuracies and lack of proper documentation of dubious sources. But with that caveat as to it’s truthfulness kept in mind, the book is quite entertaining, and the Underground well worth a visit.
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