Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Great Fire & the Regrading of Seattle
Frontier Seattle was a thrown-together village of wooden storefronts, log homes and
lumber mills. Tidewater lapped against present-day 1st Ave S, and many of the build-
ings and the streets that led to them were on stilts. No part of the original downtown
was more than 4ft above the bay at high tide, and the streets were frequently a quag-
mire.
On June 6, 1889, an apprentice woodworker accidentally let a pot of boiling glue
spill onto a pile of wood chips in a shop on 1st Ave and Madison St. The fire quickly
spread through the young city, with boardwalks providing an unstoppable conduit for
the flames. By the end of the day, 30 blocks of the city had burned, gutting the core of
downtown.
What might have seemed a catastrophe was in fact a blessing, as the city was rebuilt
immediately with handsome structures of brick, steel and stone. This time, however, the
streets were regraded and ravines and inlets filled in. This raised the new city about a
dozen feet above the old. In some areas the regrading simply meant building on top of
older ground-level buildings and streets. People had to cross deep trenches to get from
one side of the street to another. Buildings were constructed around the notion that the
first floor or two would eventually be buried when the city got around to filling in the
trenches.
The sense of transformation inspired by the Great Fire also fueled another great re-
building project. One of Seattle's original seven hills, Denny Hill, rose out of Elliott
Bay just north of Pine St. Its very steep face limited commercial traffic, though some
hotels and private homes were perched on the hilltop. City engineers determined that if
Seattle's growth were to continue, Denny Hill had to go. Between 1899 and 1912, the
hill was sluiced into Elliott Bay. Twenty million gallons of water were pumped daily
from Lake Union and sprayed onto the rock and soil. Under great pressure, the water li-
quefied the clay and dislodged the rock, all of which was sluiced into flumes. Existing
homes were simply undercut and then burned.
Of the 100,000 pioneers who set out for the Klondike gold rush, 40,000 actually ar-
rived, 20,000 worked or prospected and 300 earned more than $15,000, but only 50
kept their fortune.
