The Calkins Hotel Despoiled
A real estate trust claims tenants of an East Seattle hotel are gutting the building and flooding its rooms in a scorched-earth dispute over a lease.
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 Northwestern Trust Company, which is the owner of the Calkins Hotel in East Seattle, brought suit yesterday in the superior court to have a lease of the property to H. T. Turner and K. P. Matthews cancelled and for a restraining order to prevent the defendants from committing waste. The complaint sets out that the hotel was leased to Turner and Matthews last December for the purpose of using it as a sanitarium. It is charged that the defendants are not occupying the hotel at all, and are sending their agents to despoil it by carrying off the furnishings and fixtures. It is also alleged that they have been in the habit of turning on the water in the bath rooms until they overflowed, to the great damage of the walls and ceilings, and have done other things to damage the interior of the hotel and its fixtures. A temporary restraining order was asked until the case could be heard, and on its hearing a cancellation of the lease. Judge Lichtenberg issued the order and set the case for hearing on March 12.
“It is charged that the defendants are not occupying the hotel at all, and are sending their agents to despoil it by carrying off the furnishings and fixtures.”
Landlord-tenant disputes often feel like a modern invention, but 1892 Seattle shows that property destruction as a weapon of contract warfare is a vintage grievance. Just as current residents navigate complex leasehold disputes in a volatile housing market, this story captures the same friction between ownership and control of space.
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