Last full day in Seattle, and the thing I had to get done was printing off my train ticket to Portland. Fortunately, an opportunistic wander past an Amtrak Quik-Trac machine (not convinced I’ve spelled that correctly, but I’m also pretty sure they haven’t either, so I’ll leave it be for now) demonstrated that their barcode scanner could read the QR tag from the PDF they’d emailed me off the screen of my phone. That’s pretty convenient, and I now have my boarding pass.
My first Tourist Thing was the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Seattle Unit.
There’s a huge amount of history packed into a very short period of time, but the gist of the thing is that a steamer came into Seattle with word of gold in the Klondike, and an enormous number of people buggered off to a place they’d never previously heard of. This included the Mayor, who resigned on the spot, various policemen, firefighters, the tramcar driver who just abandoned his vehicle in the street, …
You get the idea.
The standard rules applied; Most miners found nothing, few made back what it cost them to get there & mine, and a very few actually got rich. The folks supplying them, on the other hand, made out like bandits.
Seattle billed itself as being the gateway to the Klondike, and did pretty damn well out of that. In the words of the Tour Guide on my second tourist thing of the day; “Folks, we’re closer to Mexico”
In an odd way, the National Park in a building made me remember, fondly, some of the DOC area & field offices, and the various historical protection rangers who worked in them.
Out in Occidental Square, there was a temporary artwork alongside the Firefighter Memorial; A giant block of ice, calmly melting in the sun. On a cooler day it might have noticeably cooled the air around it, but this was not that day, and you really had to be within a few inches of it to feel the chill.
Note yet another photograph of a photographer.
Tourist thing number two was Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour.
Think an irreverent look at Seattle history where the tour guide is doing stand-up comedy, and you’ve got the idea.
I had to explain my Indianapolis Colts hat to two different people; Fortunately, “It’s a souvenir of Indy; I’ve never seen a Colts game in my life” doesn’t give you a lot to work with from a comedy point of view, so they went with the New Zealand angle, with an option on the beard, instead.
Things we learned about included;
- Seattle’s never say die spirit of taking a dumb idea and sticking with it, like long-drops on a beach.
- The wildly dodgy & corrupt sawmill owner who was repeatedly made Mayor, despite how many times he bankrupted the city.
- The agreement that, if someone’s cellphone rang during the tour, the guide was allowed to answer it as a Pirate.
- Filling in the mud-filled & potholed streets with sawdust, so that you ended up with streets of oatmeal.
- The fact that we were all provably weirdos, because we had chosen, on a rare sunny day in Seattle, to go underground.
- Wooden sewer pipes which, at times, were lower than the water they were draining into, leading to shit-fountains in people’s toilets if you flushed at the wrong time.
- The attempts to stop the Great Seattle Fire by blowing up the buildings in it’s path, which might have worked if the buildings weren’t wooden.
Following that fire, with the chance to rebuild, there was the plan to raise the street level to get rid of the ‘fountains of crap’ issue; Naturally, this didn’t go smoothly, and the city ended up with streets being raised after the buildings had been rebuilt, so that you had the ground floor of a building facing a retaining wall, at the top of which was the new street level.
In the pictures below, the left is the ground floor, the right is the retaining wall, and the roof overhead is what a footpath looks like from underneath.
The footpaths came later; There were disagreements over who should pay to link the new street level with what was still the second floor of the building, so while that was happening, they put in ladders to get people down to the existing entryways.
The founder of the tour company referred to this, and the number of drunk men who perished by falling down 8′ to 35′ holes beside buildings in the area of town where most of the saloons were, as Seattle’s One-Step Program.
Eventually, the gaps were roofed over, skylights put in to allow for shopping and suchlike to happen down there, and then the spaces were eventually closed off to try to defeat an outbreak of the plague.
And then re-opened during Prohibition for storage & unobserved access purposes.
The room we’re in in these last pictures was the ground-floor space of the building in the picture behind our tour guide.
Now the street starts on the second floor.
And here, left behind decades ago by the makers of a ‘scary film’, is a Big Red Couch.
