5 photos a day

For this next series of photos of my trip to Seattle, I will show the downtown, parts of Bell town and Pioneer Square.

SAM - Seattle Art Museum. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit.

Large Sculpture in front of the Seattle Art Museum.

The library downtown is quite an impressive glass building.

Pioneer Square can lay claim to being the city’s “first neighborhood, and has one of the nation's best preserved examples of the Victorian era . This is the Smith building, built in 1914, and was the tallest building west of the Mississippi for quite some time.

and here's a few more photos of downtown:

I was very interested to learn that Seattle was built up after a terrible fire back in the 1880s's. Much of the city was destroyed and they built the city up on top of the old city. There is an underground tour, that i would have like to have taken. Here is some info about it:

The Great Seattle Fire of 1889, a town founded on mostly soggy tide flats whose streets would, whenever the rains came, bloat deep enough with mud to consume dogs and small children.

After the fire, which destroyed some 25 square blocks of mostly wooden buildings in the heart of Seattle, it was unanimously decided that all new construction must be of stone or brick masonry. The city also decided to rise up from the muck in which its original streets lay.
It was this decision that created the Underground: The city built retaining walls, eight feet or higher, on either side of the old streets, filled in the space between the walls, and paved over the fill to effectively raise the streets, making them one story higher than the old sidewalks that still ran alongside them.

Building owners, eager to capitalize on an 1890s economic boom, quickly rebuilt on the old, low, muddy ground where they had been before, unmindful of the fact that their first floor display windows and lobbies soon would become basements. Eventually, sidewalks bridged the gap between the new streets and the second story of buildings, leaving hollow tunnels (as high as 35 feet in some places) between the old and new sidewalks, and creating the passageways of today’s Underground.

Tomorrow's photos: Bainbridge Island. It was a 30 minute ferry from Seattle, a lovely island community.