Let’s remember when the Seattle Times ran a short article that inspired the Underground Tour, on this day in 1964 (August 3)
The Underground Tour, the popular Pioneer Square destination that takes you underneath of the city, had day one of its origin story 55 years ago today.
Per HistoryLink’s Walt Crowley:
On August 3, 1964, a short item in the The Seattle Times Troubleshooter column invites readers interested in tours of “the early-day Seattle store fronts and sidewalks … still intact underground” in Pioneer Square to contact Seattle journalist and author Bill Speidel (1912–1988) (“Times Troubleshooter”). The overwhelming response spurs Speidel, who has occasionally conducted informal tours of the subterranean sidewalks and basements, to organize ongoing public tours of the Square’s “Underground Seattle.” Speidel will be operating a regular “Underground Tour” by May 1965. The tours will help build support for creation of the Pioneer Square Historic District four years later, and they remain a major Seattle tourist attraction in the twenty-first century.
William Speidel was a Seattle native, journalist, and entrepreneur who relished the less-than-respectable “underside” of local history. He began conducting informal tours of Pioneer Square in the early 1960s, focusing on the subterranean sidewalks and basement catacombs created when Seattle rebuilt after its Great Fire in 1889. As new buildings were being erected, city planners raised Pioneer Square streets by one to two full stories to address chronic drainage problems. Merchants on the original ground floors survived for a while with access via sidewalk stairways, but these were eventually sealed off. The “underground” was abandoned to transients and the occasional urban spelunker like Speidel.
Read the whole thing here:
