The Midnight Champagne Heist
Six boys caught red-handed in a dance hall after looting a bonded warehouse on the Seattle waterfront.
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.
H. W. Baker's bonded warehouse on the waterfront, near the foot of University Street, was robbed of thirteen cases of imported champagne. Part of the goods were recovered yesterday by Chief Willard and Detective Roberts and the following boys were arrested for the crime: William Jenkins, Watson Olds, William Sickles, Harry Trumbull, George Armstrong (commonly called 'Chicago'), and an ex-dog catcher named Tom Callahan. The door of the warehouse was discovered open Thursday morning and investigation revealed that the end of one of the boards on the north side of the warehouse had been cut off, making a hole large enough for a boy to get through. Detective Roberts found the boys in one of the New Zealand dance hall boxes Thursday night, cracking wine they had brought in themselves. Eight of the empty bottles and four full ones were found at the New Zealand. Despite vigorous search, nothing has been discovered of the other eleven cases. The value of the champagne is about $300.
“Detective Roberts had found the boys... in one of the New Zealand dance hall boxes Thursday night, cracking wine they had brought in themselves.”
The waterfront near University Street, once a gritty district of bonded warehouses and dance halls, is now a mix of high-end hotels and the base of the Great Wheel. This incident captures the 1890s Seattle tension between the city's aspirations as a respectable shipping port and its reality as a frontier town rife with petty larceny.
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