Seattle’s Wholesale District Moves South
New buildings on South Second Street mark a major shift for Seattle's expanding trade economy.
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 wholesale district of the city is rapidly being transferred to South Second Street. The Cash-Murray Company, a wholesale grocery house, has leased one-half of the New England Investment Company's new building, near the corner of Jackson Street, on South Second, and is moving into it from the former quarters on West Street. The Stewart & Holmes Drug Company is figuring on taking the other half of the same building for a strictly wholesale drug house, and Hootwell & Ames are opening up a wholesale notion house in the Klink building, diagonally across the street. It is an encouraging sign of the growth of Seattle's wholesale trade that all the wholesale merchants and jobbers are moving into fine, commodious buildings so they can have room for stock and fine offices to meet the requirements of their expanding trade.
“It is an encouraging sign of the growth of Seattle's wholesale trade that all the wholesale merchants and jobbers are moving into fine commodious buildings.”
This 1892 industrial migration to the Pioneer Square and Chinatown area set the stage for Seattle's commercial core. Today, those same historic 'commodious buildings' are highly sought-after creative office spaces, reflecting the city’s cyclical evolution from industry to technology.
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