Well, I understand the tours take you up there. I went up there "back in the day" ( roughly 1980-81 ). I worked downstairs in the Data Processing dept for the county, tending the mainframe computer on weekends and holidays. There was only the guard and me there.
One of the guards was a nice old guy, I only knew his last name ( Butler ). We'd sit and shoot the bull all the time. I asked him if he'd been up in the tower, he said, "Yeah, you wanna see it?"...I thought, "No, I don't want to take your Ferrari for a testdrive"...haha...
So he unlocked a small door on one of the top floors, there were stairs, then the tower itself had stairs lining the walls, sort of like "Vertigo", if my memory serves correct. It was VERY dusty and "plywoody". The bell and gears are HUGE, the cupola is tiny. It was kind of funny...my first time up there was in the daytime. You have to understand that Washington Square was one of the places the homeless loved to sleep before the building was restored, sort of like Pioneer Park. And the view was fantastic. Basically 360 degrees, unobstructed, almost vertical below you. It was unique. And all these bodies were lying on the lawn. It looked like some sort of post-nuclear apocalypse...lol.
Anyhow, Butler let me take a girlfriend up there a couple of times and we watched fireworks all over the valley. That was the icing on the cake.
Poor guy, he died in about 1981, if I remember. One of the nicest guys I've ever met...RIP, Mr Butler