The Great Fire That Built the City Above Itself

On June 6, 1889, a glue pot in a cabinet shop ignited and the fire that followed burned 25 blocks of downtown Seattle to the ground in twelve hours. The city had been built on tide flats that flooded regularly, and the citizens — in one of history's great instances of disaster-as-opportunity — decided to rebuild the streets one to two stories higher than before, effectively burying the original ground floors and creating a new city on top of the old one.

The Underground Tour in Pioneer Square takes you below the current sidewalks into the preserved storefronts of the 1889 city — rooms that were ground level before the rebuild and became basements overnight. The tour is equal parts history lesson and comedy show, and the guides tell the story with a gallows humor that Seattle's pessimistic weather has perfected.

The fire also produced Seattle's distinctive architecture — the brick and stone buildings that replaced the wooden originals gave Pioneer Square its current character, and the building codes that followed ensured the city would never burn the same way again. Seattle's identity as a city that rebuilds itself — from fire, from earthquake, from economic collapse — starts here, in the ashes of 1889.