Bill Speidel's Underground Tour

The second "must do" item on my list for a morning in Seattle was Bill Speidel's Underground Tour. I found it mentioned briefly in the Visitor's Guide and it sounded right up my alley (or sort of tunnel, in this case) The tantalising blurb read: "Seattle's hidden treasure - only in Pioneer Square. Historic, tongue-in-cheek narrated walking tour. The tour begins in a restored 1890s saloon, with a 20-minute introduction. The walk lasts one hour. Daily. Please arrive at least 20 minutes early."

That was enough for me. Anything historic and tongue-in-cheek was a sure winner, although the idea of walking for an hour was still slightly threatening to my blackened and scabby knees. As it turned out, the tour involved much more laughing than actual walking and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is ever visiting Seattle. In fact, I recommend that you visit Seattle just to go on Bill Spiedel's Underground Tour.

When you first arrive in Pioneer Square, try not to be alarmed. It's a rough neighbourhood. I searched in vain for some time for a suitable parking space. Actually, there were lots of spaces, I just wanted one that was not within easy staggering distance of any of the indigent locals who were in varying states of twitchiness probably closely correlated with probability of cream puff violation. I finally parked just around the corner from Starbucks and trusted to steady foot traffic to deter crime.

My nerves were quickly forgotten when the tour started with a 20 minute stand-up comedy routine about Seattle's early history. The performance was masterful, but the raw material was solid gold to begin with. Seattle has such a rich history of corruption, vice and incredible stupidity that I am forced to admit it significantly outdoes even dear old dodgy Sydney town in the scandal stakes.

I would never have imagined that Seattle's reputation had such unplumbed depths. For a long time literally unplumbed, as in, without plumbing. My favourite part of the introduction was the description of how the city was built on tide flats, so the well-to-do folks all built their houses up on the hill. There weren't any sewers so the fathers of Seattle installed an open wooden runway down the hill through the centre of the town to the waterline. It was a steep slope, so it got off to a flying start at the top and then settled to a slow ooze.

The tide, of course, came in and out twice a day. At low tide the water (and waste) receded about 25 miles down Puget Sound and the people of Seattle could breath easily, for about six hours. Then it all came right back in again, along with the waste from Tacoma, Seattle's rival city (about 25 miles down the sound).

Naturally, the people of Seattle were very excited to take delivery of Thomas Crapper's fabulous new flushing toilet. They were so excited they could hardly sit still when a shipload of crappers arrived in the harbour. But, of course, there were still no real sewers in town. The bodgy solution had pressure problems so that at high tide the toilets flushed in reverse. I'm talking jets up to four feet high. Polite citizens called it "upflushing" or the "Tacoma bidet."

Seattle was also plagued by corrupt politicians. As an example, one of the founding fathers, timber baron Henry Yesler, started the first lottery and won it, he committed crimes as a citizen, then pardoned himself as a city official and generally did all he could to profit from public office. How did the citizens of Seattle punish him for these outrages? They only elected him two more times.

All this and much more, and the tour was still sitting in the saloon! When we finally did get underground it just got better and better. Seattle, a wholly timber city, burned down spectacularly in 1889. It was a bad day all round. A workshop in the heart of business district caught alight, and the fire spread rapidly to a nearby warehouse (timber). The warehouse had been standing empty until just that day when it received a load of several tonnes of wooden barrels, filled with whiskey. The fire was off to a roaring start and the town's firefighters sprang into action. It was their first opportunity to make use of their new fire hydrants. They twisted on their hoses and had fabulous water pressure, for about 20 minutes. Then everything stopped. By now the city was burning merrily and they were standing around with floppy hoses.

Fortunately the fire brigade still had their old tank trucks. So they jumped in the trucks and headed down to the shoreline. Guess which way the tide was going? That's right. They were chasing water and sinking and chasing water and sinking and the city was burning to the ground. It was one of those days. Finally the band of frustrated young firefighters decided that it just wasn't going to work. The best they could hope for was to contain the fire. Sounds reasonable right? Wrong. Their strategy to contain the fire was to get some dynamite and blow up some buildings to create a firebreak. What they succeeded in doing was spraying the entire town with kindling and the city was flattened in about 12 hours.

The business owners in town decided that they had learned their lesson. This time they were building only out of stone and brick. It might be a logging town, but the timber thing hadn't worked out that well. Since the city had been levelled anyway there was some talk about improving the terrain before rebuilding. Some clever engineers had a strategy to use high pressure hoses to wash half the mountains down onto the tide flats, raising the ground level and making everything much more comfortable and sensible. The business owners were interested until they found out the timeline from the eager engineers. Ten years tops, they were assured.

Perhaps strangely, they weren't prepared to wait. So they rebuilt their business in the same spot and told the city that if it wanted to raise the ground level it would just have to go up around them. The city took them at their word and promptly raised the streets. They built retaining walls around all the footpaths, then filled the foundations with whatever they had lying around ... canoes, old shoes and lots and lots of sawdust (which is such a great choice for foundations), then they sluiced the mountainside down on top. Brilliant, now all the streets were at second floor level to all the stores. The city installed ladders at the corners of each block so the citizens could get down to shopping level.

So to shop at two stores in two different blocks you would have to climb down a ladder, do your shopping, climb up a ladder, then cross the street and climb down another ladder, do your shopping and climb back up another ladder. Remember that the town was on a slope originally, so the wall closest to the waterline was over 30 feet high. Ladies, imagine climbing up and down a 30 foot ladder in high heels, voluminous petticoats and a corset. Horse manure and stray bits of cargo fell down on people's heads and it's Seattle, so it rained almost constantly and the bottom of the trenches was filled with mud. Plus, this is a timber town. Loggers like to drink on their time off. Does this sound like a safe environment for drunk people?

Finally they decided to board over the footpaths and install entrances to the underground so you could go down sensible stairs to do your shopping. They also installed clever skylights that were triple cut so they let light in, but didn't allow the people underground to look up the skirts of passing ladies.

This was considerate because there were a large number of ladies in Seattle. It was a logging town, remember? An early attempt at a census revealed 25,000 single ladies all with the same occupation: "seamstress". This was a little odd, considering that there was only one clothing store. Most of the seamstresses lived in the same street, Occidental Ave, which was the primary "garment" district, although there was apparently a little "sewing" going on all over town. The authorities launched what the papers described as "an exhaustive investigation" and decided that the best solution to all this illicit "tailoring" was to levy a tax on this popular form of recreation. A tax of $10 per "seamstress" per month was duly instituted, which is quite a lot when you consider that the going rate for a "stitch" was only a dime (10 cents). For the next four years this source of revenue constituted over 80% of the city's operating budget. So you could say Seattle was literally built on the backs of "seamstresses."

Eventually the underground was abandoned for health reasons (a little outbreak of bubonic plague). The heart of the city moved north, but prohibition gave the underground a new lease on life when the speakeasy took over the old shopping district. It was like a subterranean Las Vegas.

All that is a mere scratch on the surface of the underground tour. You really should go and have the experience yourself. The tour itself is only a scratch on the surface of the murky depths of Seattle's dodgy history and I was so intrigued that I immediately bought two books on the subject to find out more. It gets worse people, much worse. I am considering devoting some serious time to becoming an expert on Seattle's sordid past, if only for its value at dinner parties.

The final crowning glory on my underground tour came when I returned to the surface, still giggling and clutching my new books, and noticed the name of the street where I had parked my car.