The Audacity of the Midnight Knife: A Burglary Attempt on Fourth Avenue
Two men risked everything to crack a store's back door in the dead of night, only to be thwarted by a vigilant clerk and the sound of sawing.
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.
LAST NIGHT about 11 o'clock Mr. J. Wilson, of the firm of W. A. & J. Wilson, Government agents, had occasion to visit the store when his attention was called to the rear of the building by a loud noise of sawing a board. He was discovered that some person was engaged in cutting through one of the panels of the back door. He opened the door suddenly and two men darted across the lot in the rear and fled through Thompson alley. The condition of the panel shows that the burglars had cut it nearly through with a sharp knife, and that in a few minutes they would have been enabled to draw the bolts and make fashionable selections from the stock of goods. The early hour at which the burglary was attempted adds to the audacity of the act.
This 1893 report captures the raw, unpolished nature of Seattle's early crime scene—where 'government agents' ran retail stores and burglars used knives instead of power tools. It mirrors modern concerns about commercial break-ins in emerging urban centers, where the line between residential and business districts was often blurred by narrow alleys like the now-vanished Thompson Alley.
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