Trapped in the Arlington Hotel Elevator
A young woman is painfully pinned in a harrowing accident at one of Seattle's premier hotels.
Miss Elizabeth Slauson, who boards at the Arlington Hotel with her mother, was painfully injured in an elevator accident at the hotel yesterday afternoon. Miss Slauson went to the elevator on the second floor intending to go downstairs and, finding that the elevator boy, Al Mackey, had left the car to show a guest to a room, entered it to await his return. She was terrified to feel the car begin to move downwards, and tried to get out, but it continued its descent, and the roof caught her against the floor of the hall. She lay pinned down across the abdomen, tightly squeezed by the car, and cried in agony for help. Ferdinand Schinitz, one of the proprietors, ran quickly to the spot. George Erbaler, the engineer, who was in the basement, moved the car upward by working the machinery below. The fainting young woman was lifted out and carried to her room. Doctors do not think any internal injuries have been sustained, though she is painfully hurt. The cause of the moving of the car is doubtful; it is said by the other boy to sometimes act in that way even after the lever is locked.
“She lay pinned down across the abdomen, tightly squeezed by the car, and cried in agony for help.”
Early elevators were notoriously temperamental and dangerous before the introduction of robust modern safety brakes and strict mechanical inspections. Today, the Arlington Hotel site serves as a reminder of an era when downtown luxury hotels were the center of civic life and industrial accidents were a regular, often overlooked price of progress.
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