Last weekend, I checked off one more box from my summer to-do list as I descended beneath the streets of Seattle and attended Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour. For approximately 75 minutes, I got a crash course in early Seattle history and enough musty basement air to last me for a while. And, although this adventure was an “extracurricular” and not directly related to my internship, I found some potentially inspiring parallels with my work in King County’s Executive Climate Office.
White settlers arrived in the 1850s and established a town in what is now called Seattle, but was then tidal flats. The town is named after the chief of local Duwamish and Suquamish tribes, Si’ahl, who sent a letter to then-President Franklin Pierce, which included the following:
“Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by the talking wires, where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.” (Read the full letter here.)
This letter turned out to be quite prescient, most immediately when early Seattlites attempted to install a sewer system: Because the emerging city was built on the tidal flats, they had an issue where sewage would travel back up the pipes during high tide and unfortunate souls who attempted to flush during these times would often be met with a face full of crap. Suffocating in your own waste indeed.
So, when the city burned to the ground in 1888, residents saw an opportunity to address the muddy-trenches they called streets and their exploding toilets. The city decided the best solution was to raise the streets and buildings by a story over the next 10-20 years. This couldn’t happen all at once, however, so while the city worked on raising the streets, buildings were built with entrances on the first and second floors with the expectation that the first floor would eventually be underground, and the second would eventually be the ground floor. There was a significant period of time where the streets were raised, but the sidewalks remained a story below street level and city-goers would have to use a series of ladders to walk around. Even after the new sidewalks were completed, the underground remained in use as a transportation network until fears of the bubonic plague closed it in 1907.
You might be thinking that raising over 30 blocks worth of streets and sidewalks by a story or two sounds like an intimidatingly large project with a corresponding intimidatingly-sized bill – and you would be right: it took a very long time and was quite expensive.
But, dear reader, it happened. And according to my tour guide, Seattle’s street-lift was mainly financed by the city’s “sin tax” on liquor, gambling, and prostitution.
Poor decisions decades ago had led Seattle to the longstanding flooding issue and an immediate crisis in the form of a fire led to the complete devastation of the city, but also led to an opportunity to build a more adaptive city.
Climate change is causing Seattle and King County to confront new and intensifying natural challenges, including heat, flooding, sea level rise, wildfires, and smoke. And getting to zero fossil fuel emissions will take significant infrastructure investments. Fortunately, the County isn’t waiting for Seattle to burn down again before taking significant action in preparing for climate change.
At the same time, it’s hard to feel like action is happening as widely and as quickly as it needs to – especially when we look beyond the boundaries of King County. It seems unavoidable that some cities around the US and the world will be devastated by natural phenomena, and then will have to be rebuilt.
One thing we can pull away from Seattle’s history is that these re/building projects won’t be easy, and they might be strange and surprising (underground sidewalks with purple skylights, anyone?), but they can be done – especially when they have funding behind them. We might have to take a page out of Vermont’s work on passing a bill that would make polluters pay for climate damages and pass a new “sin tax” aimed at fossil fuel companies.
So, while I have some reservations about holding up a colonial frontier town with a serious flooding problem that burned down to the ground as a shining example of progress, I greatly admire the work happening in the King County Executive Climate Office that is helping to stave off the next crisis, from releasing an Extreme Heat Mitigation Strategy this summer (with a shoutout in the New York Times) to getting a $50 million EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grant to ensuring equity is a central focus to their work. I’m grateful to have been a part of the office this summer and look forward to seeing more excellent work come out of King County that can serve as a model for other cities responding to climate change.
