The next day, with slightly sore heads, we awoke to unsurprisingly grey and wet conditions. It wasn’t raining too much though, and in any case it was a quick trot from where we were staying to get breakfast. Americans love their breakfast, and what better way to spend Sunday morning than eating a huge amount of food and watching large men in suits dissect the previous day’s NFL playoffs? A head-sized omelette and hash browns later, and it was time for more exploring. The menu had alledged it involved only three eggs, but they must have been from an emu-sized chicken. It was good fuel for the walking we did over the rest of the day.
Pike Place Market is the centrepiece of downtown Seattle, a touristy selection of food stalls, souvenir shops, and novelty or unusual stores. The big draw here is, rather bizarrely, fish throwing, and we arrived in front of the large salmon stall just as men in yellow oilskins were chucking four-foot fish at each other. It was all for the cameras, of course, and predictably there was some audience participation as a portly Texan at the front had a quickly substituted fake fish thrown at him, which hit him in the head. Everyone seemed to enjoy it – but I wondered what the Salmon experts at Tsukiji in Tokyo would have made of it, throwing those expensive fish around for the public’s amusement.
After more exploring, and a quick trip to the Seahawks shop at their stadium, we signed up for a guided walk of old Seattle, which lies underground. A spirited grey-haired gent called Bruce talked us through the 90 minute trip, which began and ended in Pioneer Square. Seattle is an incredibly young city, and was founded to make use of the trees that could be slid down the hill to a natural deep-water harbour – the origins of the phrase ‘skid row’, from where they could be floated south to California to feed the property boom. Originally called ‘Duwamps’, the city was renamed Seattle after a local Native American tribal leader, Noah Sealth.
The tour was in parts interesting, but almost ruined by Bruce’s insistence on cracking continual cheesy one-liners throughout. It made the talk infuriating, as I could never tell when he was telling a fact and when he was making something up to get a laugh. For instance, he said the new city had a major rat problem, and if you took a rat-tail to city hall you would be given a nickel. Apparently the enterprising youths of the time started breeding rats to redeem, whereupon Bruce chuckled and said ”They found if you cut the tail off at an exact age, it would regrow and the rat could be used again. This was Seattle’s first re-tail operation!!”. Retail. Re-tail. Get it? So was that all a joke? Or did it happen? I was left frustrated as he launched into another fact that ended in a gag.
From what I could make out, Seattle’s early problems centred around drainage. Sewage systems hadn’t been installed initially, so when toilets arrived (cue much scatological humour from Bruce), the sewage flowed down a wooden trough to the sea, where it promptly flooded back into the city twice a day. The city then burned to the ground, and when rebuilt the city leaders decided to raise the land level to improve the situation. So the entire downtown area (such as it was), was filled in to the tops of the ground floor windows and a new street built on top. It couldn’t be completely filled in though, as the weight of compacted material used would have crushed the walls of what became the basement level, but used to be airy glass-windowed shops.
So people continued to use the underground areas as the shopping streets they had been designed as, descending steps into the gloom to get groceries and do their banking. I found this fascinating, and wondered about the people who had to work down there, what it was like to go underground to shop. Did it flood when it rained? Were the dark alcoves used by thieves or gangs? There must have been hundreds of rats everywhere? Sadly all of these questions went unasked and unanswered, as Bruce was too busy doing his stand-up routine. Sample joke - ”People used to fall down here from the raised sidewalk and die. Mostly drunks – so in early Seattle we didn’t need Alcoholics Anonymous, as we had a one-step programme!!”
Seattle Underground Tours
