The Seattle Kitchen Fire
A fire guts a cheap Seattle boarding house, leaving lodgers scrambling for safety through upper-story windows.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Seattle Kitchen, a cheap lodging house on Jefferson Street, caught fire early this morning, and when the firemen arrived, the whole interior of the building seemed to be in flames. Lodgers in a condition of nudity were leaping from the windows and stone sills and screaming for help. The building is a four-story one, and lodgers were seen leaping from the upper windows. There were ten lodgers, seven of whom were rescued with only slight injuries, while the rest—including the cook, a man named Streck, of Bainbridge, Maryland, and a man known as O'Brien, of Detroit—burned beyond recognition.
“Lodgers in a condition of nudity were leaping from the windows and stone sills and screaming for help.”
This 1887 report on a fire in a cheap lodging house highlights the perennial vulnerability of Seattle's lowest-income residents. Just as today’s headlines focus on the precarity of SROs and boarding houses, this tragedy reveals that even in the 1880s, the city struggled to provide safe, stable housing for its transient working population.
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