Seattle Underground
— — the first floor the city left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“A network of passageways and storefronts buried one story below today's Pioneer Square. After the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, the city regraded its waterfront streets a full level higher, sealing the original sidewalks underneath. Bill Speidel began guided tours in 1965 from a saloon on First Avenue. The brick arches and old prism skylights remain.
Seattle Underground, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Seattle Underground is a network of subterranean passageways and original ground-floor storefronts beneath Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle, Washington. After the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889 burned the wood-built core of the city, civic engineers regraded the streets one to two stories higher to address tidal flooding and sewer reversal at the head of Elliott Bay. The original sidewalks were sealed below. Bill Speidel's Underground Tour, founded in 1965, made the network publicly accessible from a basement entrance at the Pioneer Building on First Avenue.
What survives below the street is brick, cast iron, and old-growth Douglas fir. Heavy arched doorways frame the joins between buildings. Glass prisms set into the new sidewalks above, often called pavement lights, still glow violet on sunny afternoons as the manganese in the glass slowly oxidises under decades of ultraviolet exposure. The Pioneer Building, the Cadillac Hotel, and Doc Maynard's Public House mark the entry points. The Smith Tower above the neighbourhood was the tallest building west of the Mississippi when it opened in 1914.
Tours leave from Doc Maynard's Public House on First Avenue South in Pioneer Square. The Underground Tour and the separate Beneath the Streets tour both run daily, generally hourly between mid-morning and late afternoon, with reduced winter schedules. Routes cover roughly three blocks of the buried grid and last around seventy-five minutes. Sturdy shoes are recommended; floors are uneven and lighting is low. The neighbourhood above is the original commercial heart of Seattle, served by the Pioneer Square light rail station two blocks east.