In which Fern and I Spend a Morning Down Under

December 15, 2016

OK, wait.  Why am I sitting on a TOILET....in PUBLIC?  Well, stay tuned for the story, because this was one weird day.

My host mom's Rhetoric class is studying the modern era, and Seattle was founded during that time. Imagine - Washington State is only about 100 years old!  Pennsylvania is WAY older.  But on this day, the rhetoric class went on a field trip to Seattle. Our first stop, of course, was Starbucks.  Fern and I have warm hats today because it's chilly here.

Seattle has a unique history, and toilets actually featured pretty big.  Here's the scoop:
Seattle was built by a bunch of farmers from the midwest. They built it on the beach, below a cliff.  Bad move!  During times of unusually high tide, the whole main street was flooded up to the ankles! And guess what?  The outhouses flooded too, and the sewage ran into the Sound, where it washed out on the tide and washed back in....in Tacoma. Pee-YOU! This was called "The Aroma of Tacoma."
 
When toilets were invented (they were originally called Crappers, after the inventor, Mr. Crapper) Seattle bought hundreds of them and installed them in houses up on the bluff.  But all those toilets drained into one six-inch diameter wooden pipe, down the cliff, and into the Sound.  Still no solution for Tacoma.  But there was a problem: when the tide came in quickly, it would push all the sewage back UP the wooden pipe and build up pressure.  If you happened to be sitting on the toilet when this happened, the pressure was great enough that when you pulled the chain to flush, POOM!  You got blown off the toilet seat. This was not good at all.

When the Yukon Gold Rush started, Seattle became an important city. This was where all the men headed for the gold fields got their supplies, sleds, and dogs  before shipping out to Alaska.

But as I said before, it flooded regularly.  So they began building up the streets. Pioneer Square was one of the first neighborhoods in Seattle. Here are Fern and I at the lamppost at the corner, by the famous Pioneer Square Pergola.

In 1889, a fire started in a paint and woodwork shop, and in 18 hours 40 blocks (100 acres) had burned to the ground.  Instead of rebuilding the buildings back on the flooded ground, they built the city up on top of the buildings that were there before.  Street level was now where the second floor had been, and the doors were actually windows!

You can now tour the Underground City, and that's what we did.  Here are some photos: 
Outside the entrance to the Underground City there is a memorial fountain for Chief Sealth. He was a chief of the local Suquamish tribe. Seattle was named for him, because he was besties with Doc Maynard, one of the founders of Seattle. Yeah, I know. Sealth, Seattle....doesn't even ryhme.  

  
     Here's a window that used to be on street level and is now two stories underground:

It's darker than it looks; we had to take the photo with a flash. It's kind of spooky; there's rats and big spiders down here.

Oh, sorry. This isn't a rat. Or a spider. It's Troy. He's a Rhetoric Student. Rhetoric students are curious and carry phones with flashlight apps.

These "skylights" in the "Ceiling" are actually square glass cubes in the new sky-high sidewalk. People walked across them over our heads while we were down here. CRAZY!

A big earthquake in 1939 sent this bench from a hotel lobby crashing down into the underground city...and there it sits.

Fern and I are sitting in the door of the bank vault.    You can see the wall with windows on the right side; this was the original street level.
After all that dank darkness, it was really good to come up to the surface again, where there were even window boxes in the old windows.

Our adventure continued after this; I'll post about that in the next installment.