Fire Destroys Waterfront Boarding House
A two-story residence for sawmill workers is leveled by an early morning blaze in Seattle.
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 two-story frame boarding house owned by C. E. Adams and located on Park Avenue, near Florence Street, overlooking Lake Washington, caught fire at 1:30 o'clock yesterday morning and was burned to the ground. The loss is estimated at $3,000, with $1,000 in insurance coverage. For some time past, the building has been rented by J. L. Taylor as a boarding house for fifteen or twenty of the men employed in his mill. About 12 o'clock Sunday night, the cook built a big fire in the kitchen range and went to bed, expecting to find coals in the grate when he got up in the morning. An hour and a half after he retired, flames were discovered shooting through the kitchen roof, and before the fire department arrived on the scene, the building was destroyed. No one was hurt.
“An hour and a half after he retired, flames were discovered shooting through the kitchen roof, and before the fire department arrived on the scene the building was destroyed.”
Early 20th-century Seattle was a landscape of wooden boarding houses built to accommodate the massive influx of transient labor for the timber industry. Today, these sites are largely vanished, replaced by the dense urban fabric of the city's waterfront and hillsides.
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