Hi all,
We slept really well last night and had a bit of a sleep in today, heading off about 9am. We used the Lime app to hire e-bikes and set off towards the Queen Anne neighbourhood first. Luckily our bikes had motors due to being electric, as some of the hills near our hotel were insane! It reminded us a little of San Fran. Why the Queen Anne neighbourhood you might ask? Reason number one was to visit the facade of the house used in 'Grey's Anatomy' for Meredith's house, and reason number two was nearby Kerry Park which offers beautiful views of the city but is also used for 'Grey's' filming too. The neighbourhood was lovely with lots of cute tree lined streets.
We continued on our bikes and next passed the Fremont Bridge and headed to Gas Works Park. The gas works plant for the Seattle Gas Light Company operated here from 1906-1956. The park didn't open until 1976 as the soil had to be decontaminated first. Today, the old machinery sits disused in the park and is interesting to explore, and the hill in the park offers another nice view of Seattle. Rob had fun patting a very cute golden retriever here too! We rode our bikes from here to right near Pike Place Market where we joined a walking tour. Our guide was Joe, and he was very funny. We really enjoyed walking around Seattle with him and the two hours flew as he was very engaging. We commented throughout the tour that Seattle reminds us a lot of Melbourne - fairly gridded, a few similar hills in the CBD and a docklands looking area (and cold weather more often than not!).
Joe told us that many big companies are based here such as Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, Google, Facebook and Nintendo. Microsoft started off here as Bill Gates grew up in Seattle, but many of the others have offices here due to there being only one type of tax they need to pay in the state of Washington unlike some other states where they need to pay two. Due to such companies providing many jobs, Seattle is one of the fastest growing cities in the USA with 1000 people moving here per week, and 2/3 of the people living here having been born elsewhere.
Within the city limits of Seattle, there are 70 breweries, 487 Starbucks shops and 1000 other coffee shops. Starbucks started here (we will give those a wide berth - we can't stand Starbucks coffee!). Joe said all the beer and coffee is to help all the Seattleites get through the long, cold days and winter here. In winter there are only 6-7 hours of daylight, and it rains approximately 210 days per year, with another 70 days per year that are cloudy with no rain. We have been really lucky. Yesterday was very cloudy, but today was forecast as cloudy and the sun ended up shining down brilliantly during the tour and for the rest of the day which was a nice surprise. It did rain a little overnight but it isn't forecast to rain during the day at all while we are here. I literally brought my travel umbrella on this trip for this city, so clearly bringing it has done the trick to ward off the rain!
We stopped next outside the Seattle Art Museum and saw an interesting piece of artwork outside - a hammering man representing workers. His arm and hammer drop four times per minute every minute of every day of the year except for Labour Day. In November and December the locals knit him giant socks which he wears for the winter. Something else cool we saw here was a manhole cover that had a map of the Seattle CBD on it, with a silver bolt at our location. Joe told us these are all over the city to help you find where you are easily as you walk around.
We learned about how Seattle came to be. In 1849 the gold rush was happening in San Francisco, and they built so much down there for the growing city that they ran out of timber. A group of men were sent north to find good sources of timber, and they found it here in the form of Douglas firs. Congress also passed the 'Donation Land Claim Act' around this time, offering married men 1 free square mile each if they chose to settle out this way (3 square kilometres). One of the early settlers here, Arthur Denny, wanted to called the town 'New York' but this fell flat as the other New York already existed by this point. A few years on, a man named Doc Maynard settled here and became friendly with the local Indian chief called 'Sealth', which when he pronounced slowly sounded like 'Seattle'. Doc Maynard became close friends with the chief, who was apparently 2m tall and a very good negotiator and social operator that traded with and accommodated white settlers. Maynard asked if they could name the new settlement 'Seattle' in his honour. It is the only major city in the USA named after an indigenous person.
Our tour ended down near the harbour, where a lot of work is currently going on. Apparently there was a huge ugly six lane elevated highway down here that was taken apart in 2019, and now the area is being converted into a nice promenade/park area. It was meant to be finished in 2021 but due to Covid and Hazard Pay strikes by concreters during the pandemic has been delayed. It didn't look like it would be finished any time soon! After the tour, we sat and had lunch in the
harbour area at ‘Ivar’s Fish and Chips’. The food was tasty and the
nearby seagulls were huge. Feeding them chips is encouraged here! We didn’t
feed them any of ours because with the exchange rate the way it was we
savour every scrap of food we purchase. But we watched other people
doing so!
Next we walked a few minutes to Pioneer Square to do an underground
Seattle tour. On our walking tour we had already learned about why there
were streets underneath today’s Seattle, but we wanted to see them and
explore. Our guide was Lisa and she was hilarious and a great
storyteller. Because Seattle was a town built in an area that was a forest, initially all the buildings, footpaths, even roads sewerage pipes were built out of wood. This would work well until June 6th 1889, when an apprentice in a furniture shop was heating up glue, got distracted and forgot about it. The greasy glue overheated and caught fire. He tipped water on it which made it worse. Next door to the furniture shop was a tavern who had received a huge shipment of whisky four days prior, and next to that was a hardware store that sold ammunition. So as you can imagine, the fire caught on and exploded everywhere. Within 12 hours, 98% of the buildings in the town had burned to the ground, or the equivalent of 33 city blocks. Amazingly, no one died or was injured, which probably has a lot to do with the fire beginning at 9am on a weekday so everyone was up and about. The only people happy about the fire were the town planners, as Seattle was pretty gross at this time for a couple of reasons. The town was built upon a muddy bank that, when the tide came in, would wash up the sewage of the town back over lots of roads. The roads were falling apart due to this and some of the muddy potholes on the road were so big that kids would play in them like pools. The town planners decided that the town would be rebuilt but at a higher level, so that a proper sewerage system could be built beneath the town. Two of the biggest hills around the town were flattened and the soil from them used to level out the streets. The rebuilding of the town's buildings took six months with buildings designed to have what would become a basement level, but the levelling of the town took 12 years. So there was an awkward time for 11.5 years where to get around town via footpaths residents had to use ladders after crossing the street to get up and down to different businesses. Seventeen drunk men died during this time falling off the edges of the street, and Lisa called this "Seattle's one step program". The funds to rebuild the city came from a tax imposed upon the town's prostitutes, of which there were 2900 back then. Men greatly outnumbered women in Seattle at this time so they did a roaring trade.
So, that's why there is an underground old city underneath Seattle, and today there is 8 miles of the system left, we only explored a bit, seeing a couple of pubs, a bathroom and a bank. We also saw the glass used back in the late 1800s to create the new footpaths. Manganese was combined with the glass to keep it clear, and over time it has turned purple. It was interesting seeing the purple glass up at today's street level, and then seeing the same stretch from underground. We could hear people walking over us! The tunnels underground were used during Prohibition to sneak alcohol around, and Bill Speidel and his wife fought for the preservation of them instead of them being filled with concrete as the council had once suggested. The tour company we did the walk with was called 'Bill Speidel's Underground Tours'.
After the tour, we rode e-bikes back to our hotel. There
is an ice hockey play off going on down the road from us tonight at
Climate Pledge Arena, but tickets in the back row were $300 Australian
so we instead went to a matinee screening of the movie 'Air' at a local cinema down the street for $17 Australian each. It was good! Afterwards we had dinner at Dick's Drive In Burgers, a Seattle born burger place started in 1954. The prices were cheap and the food delicious. My friend Jordan who grew up here had recommended them. I had a chocolate thickshake as Collingwood are playing at 10.20pm for us. I will be up watching - go pies!
Love to all
Claire
Xoxox
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