Getting to
the Bottom of Things
March 22
My plan for the day was to take the Seattle
Underworld tour. You have to take a tour to see it. You can’t go down there on your
own because you might get buried by the rubble or fall down a hole and
disappear. They run tours all day, but the one I wanted, open to adults only,
started at 7.
So for a day trip, I took the monorail, which runs
from the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pine Street to the Space Needle. As I
suspected, the Space Needle is very tall and elevators shoot up the outside of
it.
This is Seattle Center, the old World’s Fair
grounds, and has a few attractions. There’s an Imax theater and a kiddy park, a
science museum and, just for good measure, a science fiction museum.
A glass exhibition at the center is outstandingly
grotesque. A hedge of real shrubs, maybe yew, surrounds a garden dotted with
glass structures shaped into fantastic, garishly colored plants, including one
that looks like a tree of bright red horns out of Dr. Seuss.
The few minutes I spent wandering the grounds, a
guitarist with an amplifier was serenading the entire place. He was probably a
fine musician, but treble, bubbly jazz riffs are just not my thing and I
couldn’t get away from it.
But that’s all right, because really I came to this
part of town to see the Olympic Sculpture Park which is straight down Broad
Street.
On the way downhill to the sculpture park I passed
a building identified as “Labor Temple.” What was this? The
Order of St. Benedict with an art deco sign? A wage slavery cult? A trustworthy
place to find temporary help?
Wrong on all guesses, I later found it is (or
perhaps was) the office of the American Federation of Labor.
The first thing I saw at the sculpture park was the
giant typewriter eraser—pink wheel, blue brush—on a grassy bank over the
highway. It was so jaunty and improbable, it was probably my favorite.
Up close is a different story. It’s by Richard
Serra, who named it Wake. It consists of five identical steel structures. Head
on, they look almost like the hulls of slender ships, but these are cartoon
ships because there is a gentle S-curve in the silhouette. You are supposed to
walk between and around them.
I did and it was actually fun. Like sneaking your
canoe through a fleet of ships or walking through a ravine with curving walls.
Or what if ships and their wakes traded places.
The path eventually brought me past the eraser
again, this time from the other side and closer, and then down to the
waterfront.
I didn't see everything. Some installations were so
minimalist, I walked past them without noticing.
Some, like Calder's Eagle, are spectacular. If you
go to the website, www.seattleartmuseum.org/visit/osp/, you can see photos of
them all.
I found a crab house called Cutters not far from
the Pike Place Market. Just to be a wise-ass I had Dungeness crab sushi and a
rock crab cake with Dungeness crab on top. It went well with Mac & Jack’s
African Amber ale. The meal was good, but I may have had enough crab for a
while. I’m going back to oysters.
It’s a good thing I got to the tour office early.
The 7 p.m. tour was sold out by 6:30 or quarter to 7. And it was the tour to
take. The tour office has a bar and since I was early I had a Copperhook ale,
which was nicely hopped and nutty. I was feeling those late-in-the-day,
early-in-the-evening doldrums, and it picked me right up.
From the time he introduced himself, you could tell
that the leader, Chris, was going to be enthusiastic about all this—one story
after another, about con games, opium dens, whores, and more whores.
We started outside a door, where he explained how
the street we were on (now called Yesler Way) was the route people once used to
drag logs to the sawmill downhill near the water. It became known as Skid Road.
You may already see where this is going. It’s also the stretch where the gambling
dens, saloons, and brothels were. It became so notorious as to become a
watchword for the notorious and disreputable. Skid Road became Skid Row.
By the early 20th century Seattle was reputed to
have outstripped the Barbary Coast of San Francisco for the distinction of
being known as the most wicked place on Earth. The most, Chris said. Now that’s
something to be proud of.
There were about 50 people in the group. We filed
through a door (No. 166 I think) and down a set of old stairs to what used to be the
first floor of an old hotel. After the city burned in 1889, it was rebuilt one
story up, on viaducts.
The old first floor was largely abandoned. Today,
you walk past piles of old junk and rubble that may have lain there since the
1890s. We had entered the building through what originally had been a
second-story window.
We gathered around an old bar—not original, but a
prop from an old TV show. It was used in an episode of “Kolchak: The Night
Stalker.” Anybody remember that one? Darren McGavin used to chase down
monsters. One guy hid in Seattle’s underground city. An underground city? How
did they do that? It put Seattle on my list of places to go. That and the
microbrews.
It was around the bar that Chris explained the civic importance of hookers. There was an occupational survey, for tax purposes, done
in the 1880s. Most of the men in Seattle were loggers and coal miners, and there wasn’t
much tax money to get from them. There were, however, more than 2,000
registered seamstresses on Occidental Avenue, where we were standing around the
corner from Skid Road.
The town started to license the seamstresses. They
paid $10 every month for a business license and that funded most of the city
government’s annual budget. That was done in new cities everywhere. It’s how
the prostitutes built the West.
Wyatt Earp owned a saloon and dealt cards at 211
Second Avenue in Seattle. He was here for a year or two, before he had a run-in
with the city fathers and left town.
Not far from Earp’s place there is a landmark flophouse.
All that’s left is the sign, offering rooms for 75 cents, as in the 1960s.
Seattle’s scam culture increased significantly with
the Gold Rush. They called it mining the miners. The practice wasn’t restricted
to outfitters charging top dollar, but included con artists of all kinds. One dodge
involved diagnosing a rare disease, made up by the doctor, and prescribing a
medicine that consisted largely of opium. Later the doctor would get to cure
the addict he had made.
On the way out, we passed an open door to a room
where there have been ghost sightings reported. We’ve all seen the History
Channel, so we know what to do if we think there may be a ghost around: snap a photo.
If you look very close you can see just behind the
door, that there is something here, but it isn’t a ghost. Just like History
Channel.
I also learned that Pioneer Square is not that
dingy park I found so disappointing. It is instead the name of the district.
The tour started at Pioneer Place, and that is where the stolen totem pole was.
So Pioneer Place, with the replacement totem pole, is the photo of the day.
Occidental Square is that name of the dingy park.
To honor all the disreputable people who made
Seattle great, I had a couple of beers and a burger at Merchant’s, in the
building you see behind the totem pole. Merchant’s bills itself as Seattle’s
oldest restaurant, started in 1890, I guess to mine miners.
Be well, all.
No comments:
Post a Comment