Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour

The glass squares embedded in the sidewalks of Pioneer Square glow with a faint, greenish light from the street level. These are not decorative; they are skylights for the original storefronts of Seattle, buried when the city regraded its streets in the eighteen nineties. After the Great Fire of eighteen eighty-nine, city planners raised the street level a full story to escape the muddy tideflats. Shopkeepers built over their old first floors, leaving the original entrances and sidewalks trapped in the dark below.