Don reporting.
Last year I spent couple of days in Seattle, but due to some problems with my knees due to a lot of stair climbing on a Panama cruise I did not get to go on Bill Speidel's Underground Tour. However, this time I made certain that I would take the tour. So saturday morning I walked around the corner to Doctor Maynard's Public Bar, the starting point for the tour. Each tour starts on the hour and although I missed the 10 am (it was booked out) I waited for the 11 am tour. I was surprise to find about 150 people at the 20 minute post-tour talk. After this we broke up into groups and set off to see the ground floor shop fronts of old Seattle now hidden below the current pavements.
How come the ground floors are now below pavement level? Well, old Seattle was built on low lying ground that used to be regularly flooded by the high tides. All the buildings were constructed of timber and as expected one day was there was a great fire. The council wanted to rebuild Seattle after raising the ground level and business people wanted rebuild immediately. Both had there way. The businesses built their brick and stone buildings and the council built 15 feet retaining walls on the boundary between the footpaths and roadways. These were back filled and the roadway was the at the first floor level while the footpaths were at the old ground level.
The next photo taken inside an old grond floor looking towards two windows facing the old pavement while the followingn is a drawing of that building that has its old groundfloor below the current footpath.
We were in Seattle, it was raining and we got very wet walking between various underground sites.
Luckily below ground it was relatively dry.
Posted with Blogsy
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