The City's Sweeping Misjudgment
Seattle's street department decides that the best time to sweep streets is during a windstorm, leaving storefronts and pedestrians choked with debris.
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 street department came to the assistance of the wind in keeping the dust moving about the streets last night. Before the stores had closed, the patent sweeper started up Front street and sent the dust flying in clouds into the doors and windows and the pedestrians' eyes, smothering the articles exposed for sale as well as those already sold on the backs of the passers-by. When the machine got through with Front, it started up Second street, and as the wind had by that time risen considerably, there will be plenty of work for the storekeepers today in cleaning their windows and exhuming their goods from under the coating in which the thoughtful city has wrapped them. As is customary, the fronts of the butcher shops were not protected by anything more than lattice work, and thus the dust had full opportunity to fly in and settle on the meat hanging up there. It does not seem to have occurred to the street superintendent that a windy night is not a good time to sweep the streets, or that the dirt could as easily be swept up after the dust had been laid by the sprinkler.
“It does not seem to have occurred to the street superintendent that a windy night is not a good time to sweep the streets.”
Municipal service planning that ignores environmental realities feels timelessly familiar to modern residents, though today's street sweepers are far more sophisticated than the 1893 'patent sweeper' that pulverized city air. It serves as a reminder that the basic tension between urban maintenance and business disruption has been a staple of Seattle civic life for over a century.
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