Bad Decisions

County Road 39 Versus Seattle's Underground Old Town

By Dan Rattiner

The day after I took a tour in Seattle about the unbelievable screw-ups by the town fathers during Seattle's early days, I learned by telephone that we had one of our own here in the Hamptons. It pales by comparison when compared to what I found out about Seattle, but it bears mentioning nonetheless.

The placing of the traffic cones along County Road 39 in Southampton, which, as we all know, has successfully ended the morning traffic jam into the Hamptons, cannot take place until the highway construction on the ramp from St. Andrews Road up to 39 is completed. They are aiming to complete it by Memorial Day. But you know how road construction is. Maybe we'll have the cones out in the fall. Until then, with one canceling out the other, the Hamptons are going to be an utter mess this summer. Who planned this project for the summertime?

Having said all that, let me tell you about Seattle. You won't believe what they did there. Seattle was founded because some white settlers arrived in the area and found a magnificent forest leading down a steep hill to a broad area of tidal flats that ended with a shoreline on the Pacific Ocean. The Indians lived everywhere except on the tidal flats. The settlers, who were businessmen, therefore decided to build a town on the tidal flats so as to be separate from the Indians, and to make their fortune cutting down all the forests on the steep hills behind it. They'd be in the lumber business. This was about 1870.

The town thrived. They had a logging operation, a lumber mill and some docks. In the town, all the buildings were made of wood. They had plenty of that. The roads were made of packed down sawdust that raised the road up a few feet so it could have drainage. And the businessmen built a big downtown on the flats and big wooden homes on the cleared hillside above. They could look down on their creation. Their sewage, it soon became apparent, also ran down into town, since the land had been stripped where they built.

To deal with this, the businessmen built a series of pipes that ran down the hill and then, on stilts, over the town and into the sea. But they made them out of wood. They had a lot of that on hand. And, pretty soon, they gave way. In any case, the raw sewage, both from the hill and the town, would float away at low tide but then return at high tide. The town stank. Around 1880, sinkholes began to form in the sawdust roads. The tides would come in and the water would rush under the sawdust. The sawdust finally just gave way, falling straight down. Some of these sinkholes were thirty feet deep and fifteen feet in diameter. Signs and barriers were put up so the horses and wagons would go around them. No one felt they could do anything to get rid of them.

In 1880, the flush toilet came to Seattle and they were installed in all of the homes and businesses. But often, when a rainstorm coincided with high tide, the water would rapidly back up under the city and the underground pressure would build up to finally fire huge geysers of water up through the toilets and into the air. The local daily paper began publishing tide charts on the front page so people would know when to use the toilets.

By 1885, the population of Seattle was 50,000, mostly men. There were also 5,000 "seamstresses" -- single women in the more rowdy part of town. In 1887, it was estimated that 70% of the revenue for the city budget came from the work of "seamstresses."

From the get-go, the government of Seattle was unbelievably corrupt. One mayor would periodically file a personal lawsuit against the city for some slight or other, and then, in his role as Mayor, settle with himself for thousands of dollars. After this scam was revealed, he nevertheless at the next election ran for Mayor again. And he won.

In 1889, a huge fire started at one end of Seattle and burned the whole place to the ground, including all the homes on the hillside. No one died, and the people were overjoyed -- not about the fact that no one had died, but because they could start over. As a result of this, a civic decision was made in Seattle that was one of the worst ever made in an American city.

The Mayor of the city realized that they could not rebuild the city out of wood anymore. They would also need proper roads. And proper sewage pipes. Most of all, they would need to raise the level of the tidal flat. They were awash in money at the time of the fire, not only from the lumber mill, but also from the discovery of vast amounts of gold to the north. And so they decided to re-grade the city. They could afford it. It was a fine idea. They would shove all the dirt from the steep hillside down onto the tidal flat, and the result would be no tidewater coming in under the new Seattle.

And so city officials met with the businessmen who owned the property downtown. The businessmen said they were totally in favor of this idea, but they had to get their businesses going right away, in the next few months. They didn't own the street, but their property abutted the streets. The town could do the grading, raising the level of the street from six to 30 feet, and that was fine with them. But they would not give permission for the government to touch their private property. They would rebuild with brick, according to the new law. But they would build at the level of the old tidal flat because they could not wait the year or two for the regrading project to be completed.

As a result of this unbelievable standoff, the new brick buildings were built at a low level, while the streets going by them were built much, much higher. As the sidewalk property in the town belonged to the business owners, the sidewalks too would be built at the low level. And so, as this "compromise" proceeded, the city had to build huge concrete retaining walls to hold up the road. Throughout Seattle -- all of it -- there was a ten-foot-wide sidewalk, and then this huge vertical municipal retaining wall to the street way up above. You would come out of a store carrying your purchases to a sidewalk at the same level as the ground floor of the store, and you'd have to climb a ladder to get to the street.

I know this sounds absolutely insane, but that is what people had to do throughout all of downtown Seattle for almost an entire generation, until a plague struck the city in 1910 and the Mayor declared that the problem was rats down at the storefront entrances below. He declared them condemned and uninhabitable. Stores and offices would have to abandon their first floors, sometimes even their second and third floors, and they would have to build new entrances to their establishments at street level, and allow the city to build what were essentially bridge sidewalks at street level, bridging the street to the buildings. There were two sidewalks now, with one as much as thirty feet above the other.

Our tour of Old Town, therefore, began in a building's second floor, level with the street. Then, we walked down a flight of steps to this abandoned underground world. There were originally forty-two square blocks like this. Now, there are nineteen square blocks and the city, in 1964, opened them up to visitors so they could be guided on a tour through them, walking entirely on the lower sidewalks with the retaining walls on one side and the abandoned storefronts on the other. We walked along former bank buildings, hotels, bars, brothels, feed stores, barbershops, hardware stores and so forth. It's the most amazing thing. You can't go INTO the wrecked stores, though. Not because they are no longer there, but because they are private property. When the city condemned the sidewalks in 1910, they left the lower floors of these buildings alone. You couldn't use them, but they were still private property.

The idea for the tours, by the way, was spearheaded back in 1964 by a newspaper editor and columnist named Bill Speidel, who fought to create the tours as part of his personal effort to save the above ground Old Town from the wrecking ball. He said this was a historic treasure. And he won that fight.

Today, the Old Town section of Seattle, renamed Pioneer Square above ground, remains almost exactly as it was 100 years ago, with the underground city below it.

Seems to me we ought to do the same thing here in the Hamptons with the old abandoned subway system that, dashing it's builders hopes and dreams, went out of business during the Crash of '29. It's a national treasure, too.

As far as the rest of Seattle goes, there are basically four parts to it. There's a main downtown business area (about ten blocks by ten blocks) with perhaps a dozen tall buildings, some of them sixty stories high, many of them containing offices relating either to Microsoft or Boeing, who have their headquarters near there. There's an industrial waterfront area where cargo ships come in and out. There's a section out of town about ninety seconds away by monorail from downtown, where the 1963 World's Fair was held and where there is the Seattle Space needle and numerous other World's Fair buildings still open to the public. And there is Old Town, now called Pioneer Square, as described above. All of this is connected in such a small area you can stroll from one place to the other, or, if you prefer, you can take a city bus, free of charge.

And, of course, there are also Starbucks everywhere (because Seattle is where Starbucks started) and there is a company called Seattle's Best Coffee everywhere (which, it turns out, is owned by Starbucks -- they are their own competition) and there is the first Starbucks, still standing near the vast Public Market, which features the lady goddess that adorns the logo of that firm, but in far less modest circumstances. At the original Starbucks, she is topless with her hair pulled back. At the other Starbucks around the world, she may be topless, but she has all her long wavy hair covering her bosom so you really don't know. Thus, Seattle does have her secrets.

As for the weather, it drizzles about ten times every day, with bits of sunshine in between sometimes -- so the city fathers claim they have more than 200 days of sunshine a year and a very low accumulation of rain, even less than Boston (because it only drizzles).

We stayed at the Fairmont Olympia, the finest hotel in town, which has great, formal, friendly service, and we can recommend two restaurants -- an Italian place called La Lanterna and a Chinese place called Q Asia.

Of course, you don't ever have to go to a restaurant at all. You can go down to the vast Public Market, which extends nearly half a mile, and at almost every stall, they'll offer you a free sample. Stay long enough, and you've had your meal.