Seattle: Bill Speidel's Underground Tour (August 2014)

My spouse and I participated in Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour in early August 2014. You can book specific tour times and pay for your tour on their website, although the office also accepts walk-in customers (who are in the majority). You can book and pay for tickets on-line up to one hour before the start of a tour. We did not book our tour ahead of time. Instead, we arrived 15 minutes prior to our tour departure time, and we purchased tickets using a credit card. The ticket booth is located in the Underground Cafe (which despite its name is located on street level).

Tours depart from Doc Maynard’s Public House, a restored 1890s saloon located on First Avenue (between Yesler Way and Cherry Street) in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle. The Underground Tour costs $18 per person, departs daily on the hour (and on the half-hour during the summertime), and lasts about 1.5 hours. The tour teaches patrons about Seattle's early history, with an emphasis on the seamier side of life and the city's reconstruction after the fire of 1889. This tour provides an interesting picture of the characters who founded Seattle. Participants must appreciate corny jokes and must climb many steps and spend time in dark, musty basements, because most of the tour takes place below street level.

Besides the Underground Tour, this company offers two additional tours: the Sub Seattle Tour (which is a 90-minute $30 per person bus tour that takes place in the evenings), and the Underworld Tour (which is a $25 per person evening adult tour of the Seattle Underworld, replete with tales of graft, debauchery, and Red-Light-District shenanigans).

After you purchase your tickets, the clerk gives you a wristband and directs you into the bar room of Doc Maynard’s Public House (which patrons can rent for private events). We were stunned at the number of people waiting for our tour (nearly 100 people!). The guide said that if the total number of participants reached 100, we would break into two groups. (What happens if only 90 people sign up? Do they remain as one large group?) Luckily, we broke into two groups, each of which was still too large, although the large group size was not as nightmarish as we originally thought. (We are a party of two adults who tend to book private tours, so that number of participants was overwhelming!)

The tour program began in the bar room, where the tour guide gave participants background information on Seattle, Pioneer Square, Bill Speidel, and the tour itself. After his monologue, we broke into groups, and began the walking tour portion of the program. We descended beneath the city streets and buildings to the original street level, where we could see the original foundations, windows, entrances, doorways, walkways, and sidewalks and excavated artifacts like furniture, a safe, and a bathtub.

Bill Speidel was a Seattle native who headed the campaign to preserve Pioneer Square. Originally a journalist and newspaper columnist, he later became a preservationist by convincing the city to designate the city’s oldest neighborhood as an historic district that contained the largest collection of Victorian-Romanesque buildings in the US.

The settlers of the city of Seattle founded their homes and businesses on tide flats whose streets flooded at high tide or whenever it rained. After the Great Fire of 1889, which destroyed 25 square blocks of wooden buildings, city planners decided that all new construction must be stone or brick. The city also decided that new construction must be built on higher ground. It was this decision that created the Underground:

The city built 8-foot retaining walls on either side of the old streets, filled in the space between the walls, and paved over the fill to raise the streets, making them one story higher than the old sidewalks that still ran alongside them. However, building owners, eager reopen for business, quickly rebuilt on the old, low, muddy ground. Later, their first floor windows and lobbies became basements. Sidewalks bridged the gap between the new streets and the second story of buildings, leaving hollow tunnels between the old and new sidewalks, and creating the passageways of the underground.

The tour ends in the basement gift shop (Rogues Gallery), where you can purchase books and other souvenirs. At the end of the tour, the guides make a shameless plea for tips and the sale of merchandise. Ironically, the book that our guide strongly recommended (called “Sons of the Profits”) was out of stock. (We later ordered it from Amazon.)

The Underground Tour was interesting. We will add this experience to our below ground memory vault, along with tours of the Yerebatan Sarayı Basilica Cistern in Istanbul, the sewers in Paris, and the cave cities in Derinkuyu Turkey (near Cappadocia).