Seattle Built New Sidewalks Above the Old Ones

Rebuilding After the Fire

The Great Seattle Fire of June 1889 destroyed much of the business district. Owners rebuilt in brick and stone, but the city also faced a problem that fireproof walls could not solve. Parts of downtown sat low enough for tides and poor drainage to interfere with everyday life.

Raising street grades offered a remedy. Business owners could not all wait for the city to finish its engineering work. New buildings went up while decisions and construction continued around them.

The result was an awkward intermediate landscape. Raised roadways stood between retaining walls, while some sidewalks and storefront entrances remained below. Moving between a business and the street could mean negotiating stairs or ladders. What later became an underground attraction began as a very visible mismatch in levels.

The city’s sewer outlets emptied into Elliott Bay, where a high tide could force water back into the system. Street grades were tied to this drainage problem. Raising the surface provided a chance to improve the system beneath it while the district was being reconstructed.

The rebuilding also involved widening and straightening streets. These were decisions about how the commercial district would function, made alongside the faster business of putting shops and offices back into use.

Daylight Through the Pavement

Eventually, sidewalks were brought up to meet the raised streets. In places, the old sidewalk areas were covered over rather than filled solid. The new walking surface became a roof over the space below, and a former ground-floor frontage could find itself beneath the pavement.

Glass sidewalk lights admitted daylight into these areas. Some used prisms to help direct light farther into the rooms. The purple color visible in many surviving pieces developed as glass containing manganese changed with exposure to sunlight.

These areaways were useful spaces associated with the buildings beside them. The amount of elevation change varied across the district. The surviving underground is a patchwork shaped by individual blocks, construction decisions, and later alterations.

The 1901 photograph shows Pioneer Square after years of rebuilding. Its substantial streets and brick buildings give little indication of the level changes beneath them. At sidewalk height, the glass lights are a much smaller piece of evidence, still embedded where pedestrians cross them.