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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was going to be in Seattle. :) It is neat to notice these all over the place.

The underground tour is more than a little crazy to see just how built up the city literally is. My favorite related topic were the spite mounds.

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I think the Seattle Tour has a bunch of factoids of which each guide chooses their own subset. First time I took the tour, they mentioned that a bunch of the material for raising the streets came from San Franscisco, which had quite a thirst of lumber (and would occasionally catch fire and burn down, boosting that demand).

Flat bottom boats hold a lot of bulky cargo, but they're a nightmare when empty. So on the return trips they ballasted them... with fill dirt.

That tour is great! I take everyone who visits seattle to it. I've had the same tour guide, and each time was different as well.

Slightly off-topic; The Seattle free walking tour (pay what you want after) is also great, epsecially for a first time visitor. My wife and I happily shelled out after the 2-hour version.

When I first learned about raising the streets at massive scale in American cities (Chicago Seattle etc.), I was very fascinated. I’m not sure if this is/was an unique American exercise.

Medieval cities used to do this; essentialy a transition from a small town to an actual city, i.e. "we are no longer able to fit the place to nature, let's do the opposite thing then."

See also Rome, which is built on top of about eight more layers of Rome. Residents often get architectural and history students asking to look at something weird in the basement.

The new Seattle waterfront sidewalks have a similar inlayed motif of large purple glass tiles. Was cool to notice the design inspiration.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/05/18/seattle-seawalls-...

https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-s-new-seawall-was-built...

I grew up in Seattle. I still need to do the tour some day when I visit. So many cities have underground tours and I've heard great things about them.

I did it last time I was out there..., I had fun and some time to kill before my flight.

The tour guide makes the tour interesting. The actual sights are cool but you're effectively on a guided tour through maybe a few small blocks of buried sidewalk. It is not earth shattering stuff though the history is definitely cool.

In the end it was worth the ~$40, $20 for the tour I think, and I felt generous so I gave the guide a big tip since he was hilarious and took us on a slightly extended route according to some folks who had done the tour in the past.

If you've already done the normal underground tour, there's also a late-night version where they talk about the seedy underbelly of early Seattle, i.e. all the prostitution and body-snatching and other assorted crimes. Or at least there used to be one.

They mentioned a bit of that on our tour. With kids ranging from 5 to 10, it was kind of funny to see the looks. (My kids, to be clear.)

I got the impression it wasn't much of an under belly, as it was a large part of the life around here.

https://mashable.com/2015/08/18/building-seattle/

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