A Costly Court House Proposal
A local property owner attempts to pressure King County into buying his bluff-top lot for an exorbitant price, despite the site's clear logistical flaws.
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.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Commissioners have repeatedly stated that they would take no further steps toward the purchase of a block of land on which to erect a court house at this session, unless some more favorable offer is made than that which has as yet been submitted, Beriah Brown keeps persistently at work circulating a petition and soliciting signatures to it, asking the Commissioners to purchase his block for $12,000. Now, no one blames Mr. Brown for wishing to sell his block to the county; that is all right, so far as it goes. No one blames a man for selling a broken-down horse for a thousand dollars, but every one gives the purchaser credit for being a fool. There are a hundred reasons why the Beriah Brown block should not be purchased by the county for court house purposes, and not one single good reason why it should be, except that its owner is anxious to sell it. The block is located on a bluff, from which no street leads down to the business portion of the city, faced on two sides by short, unimproved streets. It would be impossible to reach it until an immense sum of money had been expended in grading those streets, after which the block would stand up like a great monument of caving earth, unsightly enough to be sure.
“No one blames a man for selling a broken-down horse for a thousand dollars, but every one gives the purchaser credit for being a fool.”
This 1884 editorial highlights a classic Seattle struggle: the tension between private land speculation and public infrastructure. The 'Beriah Brown bluff' illustrates the long history of Seattle boosters trying to offload undesirable or inaccessible terrain onto the public dime—a precursor to the complicated history of regrades and civic site selection in the city's growth.
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