THIS year marks the 30th anniversary of one of Seattle's Top Ten tourist attractions. It is a very offbeat tourist diversion: 'Bill Speidel's Underground Tour' includes rat-sightings, ambles through ghostly subterranean sidewalks and store-fronts, and witty tales of wild wickedness.
The late Bill Speidel sensed the potential attractiveness of Seattle's little-known underworld long before 1965. He was a newspaperman on the crime beat when he first picked his way through the subterranean squalor of the downtown Skid Road area.
A haven for Seattle's vagrants, it gave Speidel fresh perspectives on the city's 19th-Century foundations. When he spied the bizarre, abandoned townscape of underground Seattle, Speidel recognised its symbolic and heritage values.
Delving further, in the city's archives, newspaper files and private correspondence, he amassed an entertaining collection of 19th-Century scandals involving founding fathers who were pious or entrepreneurial rogues. He dubbed them 'Sons of the Profits'.
That was the title he gave his 1967 volume of potted biographies of Seattle's better-known and most-despicable pioneers - and one strong-willed founding mother. Some of their sensational sagas are recited with glee by guides leading Underground Tour groups through the vast 'basements' of downtown Pioneer Square.
The guides are proud as well as droll: the inauguration of Bill Speidel's guided tour in 1965 helped to foster a major heritage preservation scheme for the historic Pioneer Square area.
