The Underground

For Mother’s Day, my parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins came up to Seattle to spend the afternoon. For our exciting holiday activity, we had decided to sign up for Bill Speidel’s Undergound Tour in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. The Undergound Tour is a leisurely, guided walking tour beneath Seattle’s sidewalks and streets, and let me tell you, it was pretty darn entertaining. I had no idea that there is virtually an entire neighborhood resting beneath the streets of Pioneer Square!!

The tour began with a fairly lame (and not very informative) standup comedy routine/introduction inside Doc Maynard’s Public House, a restored 1890s saloon. Once outside, the large group of tourists was broken up into several small groups and we were off for the underground. We roamed the subterranean passages that were once the main roadways and first-floor storefronts of old downtown Seattle before a disastrous fire destroyed the entire area in 1889. The tour covered about three blocks in all.

Have you ever wandered around Pioneer Square and noticed those squares of purple tiles in the sidewalk? Well, I always thought they had something to do with Seattle’s art scene, but no! They are actually SKYLIGHTS, which provided light for shoppers in the underground, which actually stayed open for business years after Seattle’s streets were raised up an entire story. So when you wander around Pioneer Square, you are actually looking into the second floor windows of the shops… weird!! The underground eventually closed down and was condemned after several earthquakes rocked the city, but the skylights remain. It was so creepy to be underneath them, looking up at where I had walked naively above dozens of times before.

I have always found history fascinating, so wandering around dingy, dim, musty old corridors was actually quite entertaining! And since at present Seattle is the current #1 love of my life, learning a bit of history about her couldn’t hurt me. Plus, I got to spend the afternoon with my family, which is always fun on many levels. My mom and grandma both had a fantastic time on the tour, and considering the date, they were really the only two people who counted.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy!