The City’s Stinking Secret
In 1888, Seattle's growing pains were literally surfacing on the beach as inadequate sewers turned the bay into an open dumping ground.
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.
Seattle is naturally situated for the best drainage of any city on the Sound. The pitch of the east and west streets is such that could the cross streets be most advantageously situated in all respects, the bay, with its great depth and constant movement of tides, is a dumping ground absolutely perfect. And yet, with all these natural advantages, our drainage system is horrible. The sewers are wholly insufficient, and instead of extending into the bay a mile or so to carry the waste of the city beyond the possibility of contamination at the city front, their contents are in fact discharged not into the bay, but upon the beach. Nobody who has been near the city front at any time during the recent warm days, especially during the hours of low or half tide, needs to be told the effect. The low-tide beach tells its own story. This refuse, at all times offensive, becomes positively dreadful sometimes, and people of delicate sense of smell fly from it as from a pestilence. It would be bad enough if it were simply unpleasant, but it is worse than this—it is poisonous to health. The sufferers from it at this time are legion, most of them in acute states of fever, while others are afflicted with intermittent headache, sleepiness, etc. The situation is so bad that it calls imperatively for immediate relief. Something must be done or we shall suffer an epidemic of fevers. What shall be done rests with the city government to determine.
“The low-tide beach tells its own story. This refuse, at all times offensive, becomes positively dreadful sometimes, and people of delicate sense of smell fly from it as from a pestilence.”
Long before the modern environmental efforts to clean up the Duwamish and Elliott Bay, Seattle’s rapid 1880s expansion was already clashing with its geography. This 1888 account of sewage on the beach highlights a recurring urban theme: the tension between explosive growth and the basic civic infrastructure required to keep that growth from becoming a public health crisis.
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