The 'Merlin Park' Real Estate Swindle
An East Coast investor uncovers a fraudulent Seattle land scheme that hyped a distant property as a 'queenly suburb.'
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.
A gentleman in Detroit recently received a letter signed Henry Smyth offering to trade 'a fine block of 300 lots in the great city of Seattle' for land in Michigan. The offer included a diagram of 'Merlin Park' and highly exaggerated claims about Seattle's growth. The circular painted a picture of a booming suburb, but in reality, Merlin Park is situated eight miles south of the business district, five miles from the nearest railway, and the land was purchased for a fraction of the price now being asked for individual lots. The promotional materials feature faulty geography, claiming the land is 'in South Seattle,' and use dated bird's-eye views of the city from before the Great Fire to entice naive buyers.
“The bird's eye view of Seattle from Merlin Park is in many ways a triumph of the imagination.”
This 1892 report on fraudulent land speculation—promising proximity to future growth that did not exist—anticipates the decades of speculative booms that shaped Seattle's physical layout. Much like modern predatory real estate marketing, the scheme relied on distance, outdated imagery, and the promise of a 'phenomenal' future to inflate the value of undeveloped tide flats or distant scrubland.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.