E M E R A L D C I T Y C H R O N I C L E S
J E T C I T Y - T H E E M E R A L D D O M A I N
We walked back through Pioneer Square, the buildings empty, the streets deserted, Korbin looking around nervously and asking me constantly if it was “safe” to be walking around downtown this late at night. There was something almost quaint about his inability to relax—his scars from a lifetime spent in east-coast cities clearly would never heal. “You’ll learn,” I kept insisting, “that life here is legitimately different—we don’t have the kinds of problems you lived with back there.”
I never got him to his car and I never watched him drive safely away, I just smiled and walked back through Pioneer Square to the ferry terminal, feeling alternately like a yokel and a sophisticate. Then the next morning I read that a man had been stabbed to death by two derelicts in Pioneer Square.
This is when I first started noticing that outsiders were looking more and more at Seattle as a wrecked paradise. An acquaintance from New York visited and delivered herself of this postmortem when she was back in New York: “Portland’s more my image of Seattle than Seattle was. Seattle seemed kind of industrial and sprawling. It wasn’t even raining. It wasn’t as hip when I got there as its reputation. And there’s no more grunge—that’s just sort of evolved into alternative, which is really mainstream now.” When she said it I kept thinking about my friend - it had been him found drained of blood in an alley courtesy of two large knife wounds in the throat - capable of surviving a decade in Baltimore, but gone after a single night in Jet City.
- Revelation - Frederick Moodey
A S T O R I E D H I S T O R Y
Seattle, situated in the state of Washington, 100 miles south of the Canadian border, is a major port city in the United States. It has had many names: 'Queen City', 'The Emerald City', 'The Gateway to Alaska', 'Rain City', and 'Jet City'. When the Denny settlers first arrived in what would eventually be named Seattle, they called it New York Alki. Alki was the Salish native word for 'pretty soon'.
Mortals strolling down the Main Arcade in Pike Place Market, scouting for fresh salmon, rarely wonder - what stood here before the 7-acre marketplace sprung up. Here's the answer - none are left alive who remember. The city of Seattle, as we know it tonight, did not exist until the turn of the 20th century. The Seattle that Kindred and mortals alike see today is located a twelve to thirty feet above where it used to be before June 6, 1889.
City of Yore
This very night in a small glass case, the Port of Seattle, Terminal 107, has archaeological evidence that what is now known as the Seattle Metropolitan area, has been inhabited for at least 4,000 years. The Native American tribes of Duwamish and Suquamish were Seattle's occupants until the latter years of the 19th century. George Vancouver, who undertook his expedition to explore the coasts of West Canada, Northwest America, and Alaska, was the first mortal European to set foot in Seattle in 1792. But the actual founding of the city of Seattle happened only in 1851, with the arrival of the Denny Party scouts. As the new settlement started expanding, Europeans made thier log-cabin empires in the business of logs and timber. The Denny Party, David Swinson 'Doc' Maynard and Henry Yesler contributed immensely in making Seattle the leader of shipping logs in the country.
The villages that the Native American tribes lived in, rested on swampy mud land. As the town of Seattle started developing, it developed around villages located on the waterfront. Pioneer Square, located exactly where it is in the Modern Nights, was the epicenter around which Seattle boomed. The town settlement began from Pioneer Square, from where onwards the city was a series of upward rising streets. At the base of these steeply rising hills was a low-lying marshland. This area overflowed with water twice everyday due to tidal waves, thus flooding the sewage line located on the corner of the waterfront streets. As all housing facilities were connected with the main sewage line lying on the waterfront, the reverse force of tidal water used to flood all the toilets in the city. A person sitting on the toilet seat could get blown off due to the force. Seattlers thus started following a tide timetable to carry out their loo-activities and other businesses that needed them to visit the waterfront. Due to this reason, many houses had their toilets located on upper floors of the house. Eventually, those who owned single-level housing also started following this formula, and constructed their toilets on a pedestal. To use these toilets, one had to climb a ladder or stairs. This was to eventually form the basis of construction for the new city of Seattle, as we know it tonight.
The Center of Nefarious Activities
Seattle during the middle part of 19th century, was a lawless town. Schools barely existed, and there were no law enforcement agencies. The only way to bring criminals to record was public hanging and mob justice. The sewage system was still poor and flooded daily, there were no paved or even walkable streets. Looting was common, bootlegging of illegal goods, trafficking of manual labor (Asian and African-American slaves), gambling, prostitution, etc., were all a part of Seattle's daily routine.
Sometime around the 1880s, things changed for this city. The development of better infrastructural facilities led to the city improving its law and order situation. A large part of the change was brought, directly and indirectly, by the upcoming sawmill businesses. This may have been associated with the arrival of enterprising Kindred in the frontier city, but if that is the case, few have any record of it. Few Kindred would survive what came next.
The Great Seattle Fire
Seattle had become the leader of the Northwest by the early 1890s. The scene was changing, the city was getting more organized, and the womenfolk had striven hard to civilize Seattle and make it a better place to work and live. But the ball that was rolling was to come to a screeching halt - shocking all of Seattle and its people.
Mortal records read that on June 6, 1889, a worker in a cabinet-making shop spilled some glue over a gasoline fire. The glue boiled and caught fire, putting the entire workshop in flames, courtesy wood chips and turpentine. They say that an unusually dry spring season led to the fire spreading quicker than normal. The fire started moving towards Second and Third Avenues, and caught a liquor store on its way. This led to a massive explosion, which further strengthened the fire. Buildings were made of wood, which made fire-dousing a difficult job. The fact that fire-fighting infrastructure was poor, only further compounded the problem. Very few Kindred believe this version of the story.
Within twelve hours, the fire had destroyed most of its downtown area, taking along with it many public service buildings, churches, and even the courthouse. 120 acres of Seattle (nearly 33 downtown and neighboring city blocks) were ravaged and destroyed, including all saw mills and wharves. The massive scale of destruction put the total damage at nearly $20,000,000 in adjusted dollars. There was only one human casualty. Only a sparse handful of Kindred in Seattle at that time are known to have survived. The purge of Kindred from the nacent Emerald Domain had been both brutal and nearly absolute. To this night, no one knows exactly how or why this occured. It remains one of the great, hidden mysteries of the area.
The New City Atop the Old City
Rehabilitation and rebuilding efforts started almost immediately. The mortals of Seattle picked themselves up quickly. What they realized was, this fire had relieved them of what they considered a massive problem - rodents. Almost a million rats were killed in the fire. They saw in the ashes on the ground an opportunity to build their city afresh.
Rather than relocating, Seattlers decided to rebuild the city as and where it was. Among the many new moves, wooden buildings were completely banned. Stone and brick construction was made mandatory. Seattlers decided to move their rebuilding efforts to a higher platform. To rid Seattle of the tide problem, downtown was leveled. Certain streets were raised as high as 22 feet to bring all downtown streets to the same height. This also gave Seattle a chance to rebuild their plumbing and sewage system, which in its existing form, was pathetic to say the least.
After rebuilding was finished, all businesses moved to the upper floors. Citizens still walked on the old streets and had to climb a staircase to get to a store. Even crossing a street required climbing up and down the stairs. The underground sidewalks were lit by glass prisms. Eventually, the fear that the underground city will again invite more infectious rodents, led to Seattle moving itself, bag and baggage, to the upper city, and leaving the old city in disuse. For the first few years, the spaces in the lower city were used as storage warehouses. Some people even carried out illegal activities there. Eventually, as almost the entire city seemed to wear its new skin, the old underground city was forgotten and abandoned by most mortals.
