The Town Built on Its Own Past
Near Port Angeles, Washington
Early Port Angeles had a problem common to waterfront towns of the era. The original streets sat close to tide level, which meant that storms and high water repeatedly flooded the lower parts of town. The solution, according to local accounts, was to fill the tideflats and raise the grade of the waterfront, effectively building a new town surface on top of an earlier one.
It is the same process that created the famous underground in Seattle's Pioneer Square, where an earlier downtown now sits one story below the current streets. Port Angeles is said to have done something similar, and local lore holds that traces of earlier structures survive beneath the raised street grade. The new streets were laid out above the fill, and merchants who had been at street level found themselves in basements.
The raised grade changed the character of the waterfront and allowed the mill and cargo operations of the early twentieth century to expand on stable ground above the tide line. Port Angeles has not developed its underground as a tourist attraction the way Seattle has, but local lore holds that the layers are there: an older town, an earlier waterfront, preserved in fragments beneath the streets where the Victorian-era commerce of the young federal city once conducted its business.
