Our tour continues with a little bit of history. Seattle is built on seven hills: Beacon Hill, First Hill, Capitol Hill, Queen Anne Hill, Cherry Hill, Yesler and Denny Hill, with Magnolia Hill, West Seattle, and Mount Baker as later annexed inclines. You get the point – it is a very hilly city. Things are built on slopes, some notoriously precarious. Landslides are a geological gamble in Seattle. Whole neighborhoods have slid into Puget Sound. In fact, one of the original hills, Denny Hill, a total of 62 city blocks, slid slowly but steadily into Elliott Bay between the years 1903 and 1928. Denny Hill is now the Denny Regrade. The Bay accepted the transfer of soil with equanimity, being over 300 feet deep in places. I will take you to some of the hills that had meaning to me.

There is a rich Native American heritage in Seattle. Mainly, the Salish, Snoqualmie, and Duwamish peoples settled where the city is now. A couple of dozen tribes along the coast left their imprint on the area. Totem poles are in evidence throughout the Northwest as symbols of native traditions and storytelling.

My high school mascot was a totem pole. I was in the first sophomore class at the new school. The students voted for the mascot. I voted for the cougar as a mascot, being an animal lover. However, the cougar was the mascot of Washington State University, and living in western Washington, the home of the U.W. Huskies, cats weren’t popular. I got on board with the totem because it honored the Native Americans who first inhabited the area. As a legacy for the school, our senior class had a red cedar totem pole carved to stand proudly in front of the school.

For fifty years, we were the Totems until the enlightened ones decided that a totem pole is a form of cultural appropriation and “can possibly cause psychological harm to Native American children”, instead of being a sign of respect for the native culture. The mascot was changed to the Redhawks. A Redhawk, of course, is a Ruger double-action revolver. Could it be that the powers-that-be prefer a firearm rather than a totem to symbolize a high school? I hesitate to guess the inner motives of bureaucrats. Maybe they meant to honor the red-tail hawk, which is prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, as indeed the picture of their mascot is an angry-looking red-headed bird. Who knows?

Pow Wow celebrations of Native American culture and heritage are held throughout the state. The SeaFair Celebration, held annually in late summer, has a Native American Pow Wow component. I will talk about SeaFair in a later post.

Seattle lies on a fault line that runs under the west coast of the US. The roller coaster effects of earthquakes are another thrill that residents of Seattle have an opportunity to experience. Most are minis reaching no more than 1 or 2 on the Richter scale, but they do upset the equilibrium. A BIG one hasn’t happened in Seattle since the 7.1 in 1949, but Alaska and California have felt the effects of 8+ earthquakes, so it may be just a matter of time. Our napping teenage son was once shaken out of slumber and off the couch by 5+ seismic event.

The combination of earthquakes and damp, saturated ground poses a constant threat of landslides. Yet, many of the most expensive homes are built on bluffs above the water with expansive views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. Duh. It is like building along the coast of Florida, where hurricanes are omnipresent. “Youse rolls the dice and youse takes yer chances,” as an enterprising Irishman once said.

Steep streets are a challenge when slippery wet. Many a manual-transmissioned car has slid backward down a slope or into other cars when piloted by an inexpert driver. I’ve seen it happen.

We will continue our tour by going to Pioneer Square near downtown Seattle and Skid Road. Its real name was Yesler Way. In early days the road had wooden planks (skids) laid along it, covered with grease to help the oxen or horses pull the heavy loads of lumber to the port. It was the dividing line between the affluent part of town and the sketchier mill-worker part. During the depression, it became Skid Row, demarcating the area where the downtrodden resided. One didn’t want to be seen south of Yesler, the grittier side of town.

I can recommend a book about Seattle during its formative years called “The Mercer Girls” by Libbie Hawker. Women were recruited in the 1860s after the Civil War by Asa Mercer, a member of one of the pioneer families of the area. He advertised in the East and Midwest for high-minded women of good character to come to Seattle to “elevate” the male population. At the time, there were ten men for every woman in the city, mostly lumberjacks and fishermen. Asa was the first president of the University of Washington and a member of the State Senate. A large residential island in Lake Washington is named for his family, as well as a principal street in Seattle.

North of Yesler is Pioneer Square, where the original white settlers started the town after they left Alki Point. It is a more sheltered part of the bay, better for their commercial objectives. Now it’s a historic district where, in 1914, the tallest building west of the Mississippi, the Smith Tower, was built. The Tower has been dwarfed by countless skyscrapers built within the last fifty years. Smith Tower is the only building in town that still has elevator operators who wear uniforms and white gloves and have to maneuver the elevator cage with a dial lever to just the right spot at each floor before they can open the glass door, then the multi-hinged metal guard to let people on and off. The elevator shaft is enclosed by glass so you can watch the elevator ascending or descending from floor to floor. There are no call buttons, only the elevator operator’s watchful eyes as he or she passes the floors. It’s fascinating. It is tempting to stay on the elevator for hours just to watch the expertise of a bygone era. *This anachronism may not exist due to a spate of modern safety regulations. It was a joy to behold when I lived there.

Captain Vancouver, an Englishman, explored the Pacific Northwest in the late 1700s, giving impetus to the idea that the land west of the Rocky Mountains had possibilities for commerce. Lewis and Clark did their inland exploration in the early 1800s. Euro-American invaders followed to settle the northwest in earnest. A group of entrepreneurs led by George Yesler and another by the Denny brothers, Arthur and David, homesteaded and settled at Alki Point in the 1850s. They recognized the potential value of the western port. They soon moved across Elliott Bay to an area now known as Pioneer Square in Seattle, where the Bay was deeper. They each headed competitive lumber operations. Seattle grew at tide level. It was a town that mainly shipped lumber, raw or finished, from its harbor. The Alaska Gold Rush of the late 1890s further encouraged white people to move West.

The timber industry flourished, and Seattle grew on the tidelands at the edge of Elliott Bay. Sawmills were constructed. Wagon loads of timber from the abundant surrounding forests were transported to the sawmills, then loaded onto ships for export around the world. Seattle was built with wood. Buildings, sidewalks, even water for plumbing was sometimes transported through wooden ducts.

The forward-looking capitalists of Seattle heard of indoor toilets – the White House had one installed in 1853. In 1881, Seattle was one of the first cities in the US to receive a bulk supply of Crapper Toilets. Over time, it became apparent that having the city built at tide level was a mistake. Sewage that was supposed to flow down into the Sound was sluicing back into the streets. Toilets backed up, creating fountains of effluent in homes twice a day during high tide. Streets were infamously turned to mud by rain and tides.

Pioneer Square was devastated by the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, which burned twenty-nine city blocks, destroyed what was then the central business district. Since it was apparent that having the city at tide level was a mistake, the city fathers decided to rebuild ten feet higher. Seattle was rapidly rebuilt and nearly doubled in size, due in part to all the new construction employment. Instead of wooden buildings, zoning codes required brick and stone buildings to be erected. After the fire, the streets were raised and built over the area that had been at tide level.

Now, there is an underground tour, ten feet below the current street level, that you can take to see the original storefronts and streets of the old city. You will see toilets mounted on pedestals like thrones to lessen the tidal backwash. I encourage any resident or visitor to take the fascinating tour.. Ghosts even haunt the underground.

Speaking of toilets. Seattle has some impressive “salles de bains” at the Columbia Tower. The 967-foot Columbia Tower has seventy-six floors with 360 ° views of Seattle, the Olympic and Cascade mountains, and Puget Sound. The Tower is the tallest building in the State of Washington. The first three floors offer retail and restaurants. The remaining seventy-three floors are luxury offices for discerning companies. The 75th floor is the Columbia Tower Club, an exclusive private club for members or invitees only. Besides having excellent gourmet food, you are treated to the poshest potties in the world.

We were invited by Janice and Jack, who were members, to join them at the Club for dinner and the city fireworks display on the 4th of July. When we arrived, Janice suggested that she and I go to the ladies’ lounge before we sat down to dinner. She stood back as I entered the lounge to watch my reaction. The room was luxurious, well-appointed with plush carpet, cushioned chairs, dressing tables, and chaise longues, but the startling feature was the individual toilet stalls along the outside wall. Each had a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the city. I gasped. How do you do potty business with the wide-open sky in front of you and the city at your feet?

Of course, I had to show Ken. We went back to our table, and I urged Ken to follow me to the ladies’ lounge. He demurred, but Jack encouraged him to go. Jack had seen the sight, as had other male club members. It was common for men to discreetly look in the “Ladies'”. The men’s room had no such marvel. Seattle has come a long way from the erupting Crappers on tidewater flats in 1881.

The fireworks were the second most interesting part of the evening. We were perched on the observation floor high above the loftiest rocket sent skyward that night, so we looked down on fireworks instead of up. An unusual sensation.

The tour of Seattle continues in my next post, featuring a lady of the evening and a troll.