Seattle from above and below

And finally I made it to Seattle! No minor blizzard can stop me ;-) Interesting enough I had two fantastic days up in Washington State which is better known for its rain than for its sunshine while the rest of the country had thunderstorms, tornados and blizzard... the lucky shamrock in my Guinness worked already!
But back to Seattle... a very lovely city I have to say. I really like the different neighborhoods which I didn't see like that anywhere else so far.

By walking through the city center I noticed those little windows in the sidewalk at most intersection. What is underneath? Well this is one of the many secrets of Seattle. For more than 30 blocks you have 'hollow' sidewalks which were put in after a huge fire destroyed the entire city in the late 19th century. At that time they decided to rise the street level by one storage which took the city a decade to put in. In the meantime you had already most of the buildings rebuild which actually lost an entire level which went into the underground.

For several decades you had two different levels of sidewalks... one for the offical business upstairs and one for 'other' business downstairs. Nowadays you have guided tours through this underground city. Very interesting! I wish I would have seen this during the prohibition which must have been very very interesting :-) But Seattle had some more surprised for me so stay tuned...