The Great Seattle Fire and the City Built on Top of Itself

On June sixth, eighteen eighty-nine, a cabinet-maker's apprentice named John Back knocked over a glue pot on a stove in a shop at the corner of Front and Madison Streets. The fire that followed consumed roughly thirty city blocks in less than twelve hours. The entire business district of Seattle, built from the Pacific Northwest's abundant timber, burned to the ground.

The city rebuilt immediately, which was the first decision. The second decision was more consequential: engineers raised the street grade. Pioneer Square sat at sea level on tidal flats, and the sewage problem was chronic, the kind of problem where tides pushed waste back up through plumbing in the wrong direction at the wrong time. The solution was to elevate the streets by anywhere from twelve to thirty-five feet by filling in around the new buildings as they went up. The original eighteen eighty-nine storefronts, freshly constructed from brick and cast iron, found themselves one full story underground.

For decades, the buried level was used for storage, then forgotten. A writer and Seattle booster named Bill Speidel rediscovered it commercially in nineteen sixty-five. He cleared the underground passages and began offering tours of what he called the Seattle Underground, the complete preserved street level of an eighteen-eighty-nine frontier city, intact beneath the feet of people going about their twentieth-century business above.

The underground exists today essentially as Speidel found it: cast-iron columns supporting the floors above, brick archways, the ghost of a Victorian city that never completely disappeared. You can walk the old sidewalks two feet below the new ones, look up through skylight panels that once were transparent, and stand in storefronts that were above ground for roughly four years before the street grade rose over their heads. The fire destroyed the city. The city's fix buried the evidence. The evidence survived anyway.