a fun-filled day

seattle during the hard times...

some pics of stuff left in the underground

Today is the anniversary of the Great Seattle fire which burned the city to the ground in 1889. Yesterday we actually learned a lot about the city's early history related to the fire and the Klondike gold Rush in 1897. First we took the trolley down to Pioneer Square, which used to be the old downtown hub of Seattle when it was built in the 1800s. we walked around and looked at a lot of the businesses and old buildings. I liked it a lot down there. While there, we went on the Seattle Underground Tour. Underneath Pioneer Square, as it is now, there are underground storefronts and sidewalks that were there before the fire. The whole city burned to the ground because a carpenter's apprentice was high on melting glue and let it spill. Also, the citizens actually blew up some of their own buildings with dynamite to try and contain the fire. It did not work. Anyways, when they decided to rebuild, they decided that they needed to build the foundation of the city up one level. They did this because with the underground plumbing, every time that the tide came in , pressure backed up in the toilet and blew sewage up through the toilets into people's houses and businesses. Eeeew.
So, when they started rebuilding, they built giant stone walls around the blocks and began filling in the streets with dirt. Once they ran out of that, they used the rubble and dead stuff from the fire to elevate the street level. Finally, once they ran out of this, they used sawdust. Currently, the streets and sidewalks are slowly sinking! Also, when they built the giant stone walls, it made it really hard for people to shop. In some places, they would have to climb up and down 30 foot ladders to get to and from the businesses. Since women used to wear dresses all of the time back then, the men used to stand at the bottom and look up their dresses as they climbed! One of the coolest things about the underground is that the businesses built skylights into the new sidewalks so there would still be light coming down to the old sidewalks to support the shady business ventures going on below. You can still see some of the skylights. Also, a lot of the businesses still use their underground area for coffee shops or stores, but all of these are not connected. It would be cool if they were!

The city also had a rat problem in the underground. So they pulled up all of the wooden sidewalks and oured concrete down there. This just brought the rats to the street level. In order to fix this before the World's Fair, the city encouraged the citizens to hunt the rats. Every rat tail brought to city hall was worth 10 cents. This continued until bity officials found that some men were breeding rats in order to get the bounty easier.

We also learned that back in the day, Tacoma and Seattle were in a battle over which city would be the major city in WA... Tacoma was winning until the gold rush hit. The USS Portland docked in Seattle and unloaded 2 tons of gold from Alaska.. this is when Seattle says, "hey, let's advertise ourselves as the gateway to Alaska!" (even though Alaska is still 1200 miles away)! Anyways, by doing this, all of the gold rushers came to Seattle and the businesses here made tons and tons of money. The sad thing is that by the time the ship filled with gold made it to port, most of the claims had already been staked in Alaska and most of the people that traveled there in the "gold rush" were too late.

We also visited the Klondike Gold Rush Museum in Pioneer Square. There, we also learned what our weight in gold is worth today. If I was made of gold I would be worth around $1,900,000, and Kraig would be worth $2,700,000! It was interesting to learn about Seattle's history.

We finished the day off by going swimming and finally finding the original Starbucks after months of hunting. Once we found it, we got some hot chocolates!