Seattle Underground Tour
|
|
Seattle_Underground_Tour_01.jpg
Seattle_Underground_Tour_02.jpg
The Seattle Underground Tour is a popular tourist attraction in Seattle, Washington's Pioneer Square neighborhood.
On June 6, 1889, most of Seattle's central business district burned to the ground in the Great Seattle Fire. It was decided to rebuild the city one to two stories higher than the original street grade, as Pioneer Square had been built mostly on filled-in tidelands and often flooded; in fact, a nine-year-old boy once drowned in a pothole in Commercial Street, now First Avenue South. The new street level also assisted in ensuring that gravity-assisted flush toilets didn't back up during high tide in Elliott Bay. For a while, merchants carried on business in the lowest floors of buildings that survived the fire, and pedestrians continued to use the underground sidewalks, but in 1907 the city condemned the Underground for fear of bubonic plague. The basements were simply left to deteriorate, or served as storage. In some cases they illegally became flophouses for the homeless, gambling halls, speakeasies, and opium dens.
Seattle_Underground_Tour_03.jpg
In 1965, local citizen Bill Speidel realized there might be interest--and profit--in the subterranean ruins. He established "Bill Speidel's Underground Tour," and took paying customers on a tour of what was left underneath Pioneer Square, paying rent to the building owners for the privilege of doing so. He also peppered his tour patter with tall tales from Seattle's history (some more factual than others), giving the tour an amusing counterculture feel that made it an "underground" tour in every sense of the word.
The Underground was featured as the setting of the 1973 TV movie The Night Strangler, although the set designers decided to create a much more photogenic version on a Hollywood sound stage. It was also the setting for an episode of the TV show Scooby-Doo.
Seattle_Underground_Tour_04.jpg
Over the years, the tour has become more popular, and the underground structures have been steadily refurbished to be more visually appealing, but it still takes a great deal of imagination and some skillful storytelling to look at rotting sub-flooring and get a real sense of what life was like in old Seattle. Regardless, it remains an extremely popular attraction for visitors and locals alike.
External links
- Bill Speidel's Underground Tour (http://www.undergroundtour.com/)