Down The Pike

STANDING AT the entrance to the public market in the crosswalk on First Avenue and looking east up the center line of Pike Street — the view in this week's "Now and Then" — you might imagine trains rolling directly through you and also under you.

And while you may no longer see them, they can still be felt.

The once popular Seattle historian-journalist J. Willis Sayre explains why in "This City of Ours," his entertaining Seattle trivia book that was published for Seattle Schools in 1936.

Describing a tour on First Avenue, he writes, "Now let's go down to Pike Street. Here you are directly above the Great Northern tunnel built under the city in 1904." Today, if you are sensitive and wear wooden shoes, you can still feel the rumble below because trains still regularly use the tunnel. The choo-choo coming at you through most of the 1870s was Seattle's first railroad, the narrow-gauged train that carried coal cars transferred from scows on Lake Union to bunkers at the waterfront foot of Pike Street.

This view on Pike was recorded a few years before the tunnel was built beneath it — sometime between 1897 and 1900. A block away the trolley turning west off Second Avenue onto Pike carries a banner advertising Gold Rush outfits at Cooper and Levi's. That hysteria began in '97; in 1901 the rails for the Front Street (First Avenue) Cable Cars were removed. But here, on the right, they still turn to Pike from First Avenue.

In this picture, Pike is paved with bricks, while First Avenue is still planked. When the tunnel was being built, the public works department made its traffic count at Second Avenue. Of the 3,959 vehicles crossing the intersection with Pike on Friday Dec. 23, 1904, only 14 were automobiles; 178 were buggies.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.