The Phoenix of the Pacific: Seattle Three Years After the Great Fire
Reflecting on the 1889 conflagration, the city celebrates its rapid transformation from a pile of smoldering ruins into a booming commercial metropolis.
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.
June 6, 1889, is a date that will ever convey a sorrowful thought to the residents of Puget Sound, for on that day, a young city bright in promise and strong in architectural structures was sacrificed to glowing embers. But even in the charred wreck of home and fortune, Seattle proudly lifted her head and was infused with the breath of a new life. As from the ruins of Chicago there sprang a new and mightier Chicago, so from this entry to the sea there arose a new Queen City. The fire had its origin in a paint shop at the corner of Front and Madison streets. It traveled southward to the waterfront, licking up docks, wharves, and warehouses. The Occidental hotel block and Frye opera-house block disappeared as completely as though swept by a cyclone. Tomorrow will be the third anniversary of the destruction of upwards of ten million dollars in property. But the present commercial city of 55,000 population, with its handsome and towering business blocks, proves that an apparent dire calamity was but a disguised blessing, an incentive to a greater prosperity and an incomparably higher destiny.
“Even in the charred wreck of home and fortune, Seattle proudly lifted her head and was infused with the breath of a new life.”
The 1889 fire destroyed the wooden business district of Seattle, allowing for a rapid regrade and the transition to brick and stone construction. Today, the tension between preserving historic survivors of that era and the constant pressure for modern redevelopment remains a central feature of Seattle's civic discourse.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.