Seattle is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of North America and the largest city on the West Coast north of San Francisco. We were quite surprised by this city. Of course, it helped that the sun was shinning on both days we were there. We were expecting drizzle.
We visited the city in 2012.
Smith Tower is named after its builder, firearm and typewriter magnate Lyman Cornelius Smith a designated Seattle landmark. (Built July 1914)
Seattle was re-built after the great fire of 1889. They actually built it above the old. There is a tour of the Seattle underground near Pioneer Square.
The Seattle Underground is a network of underground passageways and basements in the Pioneer Square.
They were located at ground level when the city was built in the mid-19th century but fell into disuse after the streets were elevated. In recent decades, they have become a tourist attraction, with guided tours taking place around the area.
After the great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889,[new construction was required to be of masonry, and the town’s streets were regraded one to two stories higher.
Pioneer Square had originally been built mostly on filled-in tidelands and often flooded. The new street level also kept sewers draining into Elliot Bay from backing up at high tide.
For the regrade, the streets were lined with concrete walls that formed narrow alleyways between the walls and the buildings on both sides of the street, with a wide “alley” where the street was. The naturally steep hillsides were used and, through a series of sluices, material was washed into the wide “alleys”, by raising the streets to the desired new level, generally 3.7 m higher than before, in some places nearly 9.1 m.
At first, pedestrians climbed ladders to go between street level and the sidewalks in front of the building entrances. Brick archways were constructed next to the road surface, above the submerged sidewalks. Vault lights (a form of walk-on skylight with small panes of clear glass which later became amethyst-coloured were installed over the gap from the raised street and the building, creating the area now called the Seattle Underground.
When they reconstructed their buildings, merchants and landlords knew that the ground floor would eventually be underground and the next floor up would be the new ground floor, so there is very little decoration on the doors and windows of the original ground floor, but extensive decoration on the new ground floor.
Once the new sidewalks were complete, building owners moved their businesses to the new ground floor, although merchants carried on business in the lowest floors of buildings that survived the fire, and pedestrians continued to use the underground sidewalks lit by the vault lights (still seen on some streets) embedded in the grade-level sidewalk above.
The Museum of Flight is a private non-profit museum a King County International Airport (Boeing field) It was established in 1965. As the largest private air and space museum in the world. We are great time visiting this museum. A lot of airplanes on display from various periods. Lots of information. It was fun to walk through the British Concorde that had been donated by BA to the museum after it’s last flight.
Travels with us 