Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour

I wouldn’t personally recommend this tour. The negatives: the «tour» is basically of an old basement with fungus and mildew and trash thrown around. I didn’t think seeing that was particularly worth $ 20. It was a bit of a lengthy tour as well. By the end I was so ready to leave. On the positive note I can say I learned a few history facts about Seattle. I live in Seattle and it would not be my recommendation for visitors trying to see the city. Just a personal opinion as many other people seemed to enjoy the tour.

I had someone come in from out of town so of course I had to take them to the underground tour right? Correct and it was wonderful although I do love history Jacob made this a very unforgettable experience. Thank you for giving us a pretty awesome morning Jacob.

One of the most fascinating historical tours our country has to offer. Without knowing about Seattle’s underground, you’re simply uninformed about how this city came to be!
Our guide Alli was funny, knowledgeable and knew how to handle every weird situation with ease (a baby rat died on a section of the tour and a VERY drugged out homeless man walking up to us in the street and cursing at God knows who…)
We had a student discount that totaled to $ 35.00.
We arrived at 9:55am on Sunday and made the 10:00am tour.
Loved this experience.

Jacob was a funny, informative, and energetic guide. I would highly recommend this tour!

We started at the bar that was attached to the tour quarters. This was a good one way to begin a 1.5 hour tour. I was just worried that I would need a restroom halfway thru.
The tour started with a 10 min overview of how it all began. The man speaking was funny and spoke well. After his intro, we were off! It started raining and luckily we had umbrellas. Everything was interesting, I thought. I got to learn more about Seattle and what happened back then. Things looked kinda creepy in the areas with no light.
Overall, the tour guide knew her stuff and was humorous at times. This is a good tour if you are visiting for the first time.

While this was an ideal way to spend a particularly rainy and windy Seattle afternoon, I’d have to say your experience is highly dependent on which tour guide you end up, and if he/​she is a good storyteller. Pretty sure our guide probably indulged in a little too much the evening before, so stories were disjointed, hard to follow and at times, totally random.
At the very least, I can say it was educational. I learned a little history about Seattle.

Visiting family for the holidays and they surprised me with this tour! Best surprise! This is an awesome tour to learn about the history of Seattle and an unique perspective… underground. We had Jacob as our tour guide and he did not disappoint! Great wit and very knowledgeable about his beloved city. Be ready for some potty humor as you discover that great things can arise from the sewers.
Good things to know… must be good with walking and going up and down stairs. You don’t stay in the tunnels the whole time and will cross the streets to enter the tunnels from different buildings. You learn alot and it’s fun to participate and interact with your guide. You can take lots of cool photos and at the end is a gift shop and a place to purchase a souvenir photo.
Worth it overall for a great 75 min tour of Seattle!

This was a neat little history tour, not quite as funny as reviews made it out to be but maybe that depends on the guide.
I don’t recommend this for younger kids, they’ll be bored.

The Underground Tour is certainly a worthwhile activity to participate in if you are touring Seattle. The first 15 or so minutes is dedicated to providing everyone a fast history of Seattle’s beginnings. Honestly, I found that to be the most fascinating part of the tour.
Thereafter, we moved on to walking through a couple of the adjacent underground areas. Seeing just one of the corridors would have satisfied me, but we actually walked through one or two more. The first 15-​minute verbal briefing is integral to understanding the «other city» beneath Seattle. The guide did a nice job explaining things and also injecting the entertaining parts of Seattle’s sexual past.
Overall, I’m happy that I participated and that I walked away with knowledge that I would have otherwise likely never gleaned.

As it can get quite rainy and chilly in Seattle, getting underground away from the elements seemed like a good idea. That’s definitely the best time for Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour.
A little piece of history of Seattle. Our guide did make it interesting and entertaining. But there are nothing much to see underground.
Recommend if you are interested in the History of the City or you can just do some background read before visiting.

I absolutely loved this tour! So glad we have a local showing us around or we never would have known about it. Definitely a highlight of our trip!
You buy tickets ($ 19 Adult, $ 16 Student), and then you can sit down in this quaint bar area while you wait for your tour (tours leave on the hour, every hour). If you purchase something in the bar, then you get a priority seating pass. We didn’t do that, but since it wasn’t overly crowded it didn’t matter.
We were all escorted into a room where we could use the bathroom since we wouldn’t have access to one for the next hour during the tour. They also played music, or we could get on our cell phones like Seattlites do ;)
Mary gave us a hilarious introduction to the tour, filled with tons of fabulous puns. It was very entertaining and got me excited for the rest of the tour!
I don’t want to give the factoids from the tour away, but it was well worth every penny! Our tour guide was Dean, and he was hilarious! He started by asking for names, and he heard Kelly, so for the rest of the tour he addressed our entire group as «Kelly.» He was a great storyteller, and did a good job of ushering all of us «survivors» through the tour route.
I would consider this a «must do» if you ever visit Seattle, or if you live here and have never done it!

First off, this is one of the most amazing tours that I have ever been on. For only $ 19 you get so much history and facts about the old Seattle history. It is such an amazing experience. The tours guides are super hilarious and really make sure the tour is having fun. The tour guides also speak super loud so that everyone can hear what they are saying, even if you are in the back.
The tour first started off with an awesome historian name Mary ushering us into a long beautiful room with seats and she gave us the full background of the history and how Seattle first began. We then went into two different groups and my group then left with Dean. He was so funny and great that I honestly couldn’t stop laughing during the entire tour.
This is a must do tour when you are in Seattle to get the full experience of the area. It is a full 100% walking tour but it’s super beautiful and you get to see Seattle is such a different light.
Thank you so much Mary and Dean for this amazing tour!

Loved it here! Went on this tour for my birthday today and it was way beyond my expectations. Shoutout to Jeff (I believe that was his name) for being an awesome & lively tour guide. Of course I expected it to be old and musky but what I didn’t expect was the fact that everything was still pretty in tact. I was very impressed. Although history was never my cup of tea, going on this tour is definitely something else. I couldn’t grasp the fact that this was once the actual town so I was pretty much mind-​blown the whole time.
Lots of goodness about this place. Definitely recommend it. This is probably one of the best tours I’ve gone on for anything… ever.

Toured with the 5:00 P.M. Group on 07/​03/​2015:
Though there are so many places to visit in Seattle, I think this tour is certainly unique. Think of it as a little history trivia :) Besides all of the beautiful sites to visit from the CityPass, you should add this tour to your list. Just go on their site to see details, schedules, etc.

This is a great way to kill a few hours when you are in Seattle.
My friend suggested that my sis and I do this tour since I had less than a day in Seattle… I’m really glad we took up his suggestion.
The Underground Tour part is interesting, but the information that you get via your tour guide is the real attraction.
I *really* appreciated how our guide discussed the aboriginal peoples and how they lived peacefully before the European settlers came to take and colonize. He also discussed how the Underground was actually the sidewalk before they built up the City. They had to do this in order to stop the waste (read: feces) from taking over the city via the tide. However, the most interesting fact we learned was that Seattle was built on tax dollars from brothels… and Madame Lou Graham became so rich and powerful that her estate was donated to build the Seattle Public School District — but the District refuses to recognize her name due to her salacious past.
Again, if you have time to meander in Seattle — this tour is worth the $ 17.

We love Amaura! And the tour! What a fun thing to do and I do wish we had time to do the Ghostbusters Tour, dressing up and running around scary tunnels at night sounds like a blast.
This tour is full of history and humor. Our guide, Amaura, was knowledgeable, quick-​witted and chock full of historical information. If more history tours were given like this, we’d be overrun with children wanting to do it professionally. And they would learn!
There is no «white-​washing» the past here! Seattle’s birth and growth were created by bad decisions and greed. Ask about the seamstress profession. It is the oldest one in the world according to Seattle’s history.
From being built in a flood plane, to a very detailed lack of sanitation infrastructure, Seattle pulled down the mountains around it and built itself on its burned carcass after the 1889 Great Seattle Fire — do not throw water on a grease fire.
You get to go up and down and around Pioneer Square, walking through Seattle’s original streets that were laid out during low tide!
See if you can figure out what the black dress stands for among the ladies of the… seamstress community.
It’s well worth the $ 19 for the standard tour for both locals & visitors!

Our tour guide was really good, she was passionate and engaging with the group really well.
My drawback is that I was expecting more from the tour. It was a 75 minute tour but it sure doesn’t feel like 75 worth of information especially for the price! I thought we would be walking the entire tour through undergrounds but its above ground and below ground you go for each portion of history. It’s cool to be underground but many times it was hard to put into perspective what the area was really like back in the day, although they try to tell you want it use to be. I wanted to have a better idea of where were were, more in depth, if it was back in time, when the storied they were telling us took place.
Maybe I’m asking for too much but I’ve been on other tours in different cities which I felt were much more satisfying and cost the same. I wish I would have shopped around for other options.

Actual tour is incredible, rich with history and antiques strewn among underground rubble.
History before the tour starts is presented in a comical but factual manner that is both informative and entertaining.
Coolest sightseeing opportunity you will find in the area.
I would go again if taking friends who hadn’t yet experienced this :)

I think I learned the most about Seattle through this wonderful underground experience. It’s about two hours long, with a lot of fun facts and history about how these underground passageways came about. I’m a fan of history, so getting the backlog of how this part of the country became known, the logging community, how the roads were named, the pioneers, it all definitely a fun experience. I’ve done segway tours, bus tours, on and on, but never a underground tour! I couldn’t imagine too many of these which is why I give it a thumbs up as a must do when you visit the rainy city!
The area seems a bit worn down, old businesses and the smell of cajon food (there’s a restaurant just around the corner). Your friendly, lively tour guide will share with you everything there is to know about how the tunnels came about. It is a junky mess down there, so watch your step! There were a few other fascinating items down there that I found wonderfully interesting especially since I’m in the Engineering industry.
As far as tours go, if you’re more about seeing sights and monuments and selfie ops, then there are plenty of other tour guides out there. This one is more centered around the history of Seattle and how the underground tunnels came about.

Adam and I are not much of a guided tour kind of couple. Everywhere we go we blazed our own trail. Sometimes we discover food, places, people and sometimes nada! For the latter — we only have ourselves to blame.
One of our friends wanted to watch something before this and he wasn’t able to. To placate his need for some culture we joined them for a very unique guided tour.
It starts with a 15 minute pep talk at a bar like assembly room. Rows of benches awaits eager sponge-​like brains.
It’s a total of a 90minute tour including the intro. We where divided into three groups for our particular time slot. It was a very delightfully funny intro. I sat there wishing the guy presenting would be our guide. Guess what? He was!
We went out and in thru an unmarked door across the street. Down the rabbit hole and into another rabbit hole. Musty underground. Dark, damp and bathe in history. Must be such an explosive time to be in Seattle. Things were changing. Walls were up. Leaders were figuring out what to do with their sewer issue. The «SEAMSTRESSES» were this group of working women who earned more than any men did in that era. Don’t forget to check out the picture of one seamstress in the group picture that’s up on the wall in the gift shop. Who is different from everybody?
You have to go down to go up. Strange way of moving about in the city then. The term «Skid Row» was coined in Seattle. It’s that steep mountain/​hill that caused them so much pain. They used to let the big trees slide/​skid down the steep hill down to where they can use it. Hence the term «Skid Row.» But looking at it now, walking the hills now; the locals and visitors alike derive so much pleasure from the beautiful view.
The underground is very much active now. Even the gift shop is underground.
$ 30+/person. After the tour walk around the area it’s called Pioneer Square. It’s a totally different vibe. I love it! It’s street punk with cred. I even spied a wedding chapel.
If you walk uphill you will end up in Japan Town. You will definitely walk by the Waterfall Garden. Make a stop. It’s free and it’s awesome!

L’histoire de Seattle présentée aux travers de plusieurs sous sols d’un quartier historique et qui est contée sous forme humoristique (bon niveau d’anglais requis pour en profiter). Le visuel n’est pas exceptionnel mais les anecdotes et le storytelling sont accrocheurs.
C’est la visite historique de la ville !