2006-07-02 The Journey 2006-07-03 Orcas Island 2006-07-04 Orcas Island to Victoria 2006-07-05 Victoria to Olympic NP 2006-07-06 Olympic NP 2006-07-07 Olympic NP to Seattle 2006-07-08 Seattle CVS

Day 7 - Saturday, July 8, 2006

I wasn't flying back to Austin until Sunday, so I had all of Saturday to goof off in Seattle.  My hotel was no more than 1/2 mile from Seattle Center and within easy walking distance of the other tourist attractions.  Having never really seen any part of Seattle other than Redmond, I opted to see all of the stuff that everyone told me a first-timer to Seattle must see.  The first thing I noticed about Seattle is how much of a pedestrian-friendly city it is.  Just about anyplace that's worth getting to can be reached on foot, and if it's too far to go on foot, there are busses everywhere.  But unfortunately, the monorail wasn't working.

I began my self-styled nickel tour in Pioneer Square, the oldest part of the city and home to Bill Speidel's Underground Tour.  Bill Speidel was a Seattle Times columnist who, in the 1960's, sought to bring both humor and a dose of reality to the "official" historical accounts of Seattle's early days.  His 1967 book, "Sons of the Profits," told it like it was, revealing the dirty politics, greed, and corruption that the accepted textbooks never seemed to mention.  Around the time that the book was published, he also began giving informal tours of the "Seattle Underground" in Pioneer Square.  Speidel's work was instrumental in saving the square from the wrecking ball and, in a larger sense, in helping to launch the movement to preserve historic buildings nationwide.

The original city of Seattle was built on a tide plain, largely because it was the only piece of land that the Native Americans didn't want.  This caused obvious problems with flooding and wreaked havoc with the gravity sewers, so after a fire leveled the city in 1889, it was decided to build the entire Central Business District up one story.  But there was a catch.  In order to raise the grade level of the streets, the city needed to sluice rock from a nearby hill, and since sluicing was a relatively new technique, it was going to require a lot of money.  The city couldn't get money to pay for raising the streets until the businesses were rebuilt and the tax dollars started flowing again.  So Seattle told business owners to go ahead and rebuild their buildings in downtown but to design the main entrances on the second floor.  Once the tax base was re-established, then the city had enough money to build retaining walls and sluice in the material to raise the streets.  But this left the original storefronts stranded below grade level, so for a while, people had to use ladders to cross the street.  Eventually, beams were attached between the buildings and the retaining walls, and sidewalks were laid on top of them.  This moved the main entrances of the buildings up the second floor, per design, and created an underground area consisting of the former sidewalks and former first floors.  Some of these basements were abandoned altogether or used as storage, but others became illegal gambling halls, speakeasies, and opium dens at various times during the first half of the 20th Century.

After the tour, I headed over to the Pike Place Market, watched the fish throwers, and found some really good $5 sushi for lunch.  After lunch, I was off to Seattle Center and the Space Needle.  The Space Needle was a bit too crowded, so I went to the Pacific Science Center to kill a few hours.  Their featured exhibit was on the history of video games, and as anyone who knows me can imagine, I got a lot of mileage out of that exhibit.  The center was also running an exhibit on 3D graphics and optical illusions, and all of this was in addition to their regular collection of hands-on exhibits that demonstrate various principles of physics, etc.  After wasting away the entire afternoon in there, I went back out to the Space Needle around dinnertime and was able to walk right up.

There isn't much else to say about the trip.  I got to the airport 3 hours early on Sunday and was able to use the return leg of my Frontier ticket, and apparently my actions didn't incur the ire of the TSA this time around.  The flight back was incredibly bumpy, but it always is through Denver.