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The Earth Moved

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COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF HISTORY & INDUSTRY The tenement on the far right sat at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Lane Street. Much of the Chinatown International District rests on blocks raised during the Jackson Street Regrade of 1907-09. PAUL DORPAT The view of the Uwajimaya Village underground parking lot looks northeast from near Fifth and Lane.

BETWEEN 1907 AND 1909, while the destruction of Denny Hill was daily attracting its own unpaid force of sidewalk inspectors, Seattle's other big earth-moving project, the Jackson Street Regrade, was under way. Compared to the Denny Hill excitements, this regrade was underwhelming to the curious public — until the workers started lifting the neighborhood.

The Jackson Street Regrade was named for its main street and northern border. On Jackson, dirt was mostly removed — lowering the grade nearly 90 feet at Ninth Avenue. But here at Fifth and Lane, three blocks south of Jackson, the blocks were lifted with dirt borrowed from the burrowing and sluicing along Jackson and King Street and also from the low ridge to the east.

About 56 city blocks were reshaped by this regrade, 29 of them excavated and 27 — including these — raised. In particular, these blocks just east of Fifth straddle both the old waterfront line and the trestle of the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad after it was redirected in 1879 to the shoreline south of King Street. The wood-boring Teredo worms had quickly devoured the original trestle that headed directly across the tidelands from the waterfront.

In these raised blocks the city was responsible for lifting the streets to the new grade. The property owners, however, were required to first lift their structures and then either fill in below them or construct what amounted to super-basements. Many chose the latter.

Later this subterranean region would build its own urban legends of sunken chambers reached by labyrinthine tunnels and appointed for gambling, opium and other popular pastimes. This particular underground at Fifth and Lane is now a parking lot for Uwajimaya Village.

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