The Last of the Crib-Dwellers
A railroad company successfully clears the last remaining shack underneath the King Street trestle.
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 ejectment suit of the Columbia & Puget Sound Shore Railroad Company against Antoni Vermurier, who has for eighteen months resisted the efforts of the railroad company to eject him from a small shack underneath the King Street trestle, was decided yesterday in Judge Osborn’s court in favor of the plaintiff. The jury gave damages of $6, but the company is glad to get rid of Vermurier without getting damages. Vermurier did not occupy the shack, but sublet it to a French prostitute, the last one of the thirteen or more who ever since the fire have occupied cribs under the trestle in spite of the efforts of the company to get rid of them.
“Vermurier did not occupy the shack, but sublet it to a French prostitute, the last one of the thirteen or more who ever since the fire have occupied cribs under the trestle.”
In the 1890s, the space beneath the King Street trestle was a site of extreme precarity and displacement. Today, the area remains a landscape of industrial history and constant urban transformation, where the tension between private infrastructure expansion and the unhoused persists.
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