Seattle Underground Tours (two-story city joke)

The Seattle Underground tours in Pioneer Square take visitors through portions of the city's subterranean passages created when the city rebuilt and raised street levels after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. The tours are a long-running tourist attraction that showcase storefronts and sidewalks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that now lie below modern street level. Locals frequently joke that Seattle is literally a two-story city because of these visible layers of old streets beneath the present downtown.