A Deadly Hole on Pioneer Place
A routine street crossing turns fatal when rotten wooden planks give way under a carriage horse.
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.
As Hiram Cure was driving his express wagon across Pioneer Place about 2 o'clock yesterday afternoon, and was turning to the north to avoid a patch in the planking, his horse caught his foreleg in a hole between the rails of the electric railway track. The rotten wood tore away and let the animal through. Mr. Cure would have been thrown over the horse's head had he not sprung clear over it to the ground. The horse's left foreleg was broken and his left hind leg badly wrenched above the hoof. Officer Murphy shot the animal dead with his revolver and the body was removed by the health department. Mr. Cure says the horse was 7 years old, weighed 1,500 pounds and was worth $300. The planking was afterwards properly repaired.
“The rotten wood tore away and let the animal through.”
Pioneer Square remains the heart of historic Seattle, though today’s visitors are more concerned with uneven cobblestones than trapdoor-like wooden planks. This incident captures the precarious nature of early urban infrastructure in Seattle, where 'progress' often meant dodging dangerous decay in the city’s most vital public spaces.
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