The Great Yakima Avenue Conflagration
A devastating blaze sweeps through the business district, leveled by fire and saved only by the grit of citizens and a stand of shade trees.
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.
Yakima, which had long escaped any serious scorching, came in for a good-sized dose of it on Sunday evening, when all of the frame buildings on Yakima Avenue from Lowe’s block to Front Street were leveled to ashes. The fire originated in S. Harris’s restaurant about 8:30 o’clock. The night was quiet, with hardly a breath of wind, which limited the damage. Two factors saved the rest of the block: S.J. Lowe’s brick building and the shade trees lining the street. The fire department worked well, but the blaze was fed by the explosion of a lamp in the restaurant kitchen. Many merchants, including Lewis, Shardlow & McDaniel, and Kirkman, refused to move their stock and were consequently better off. Lowe's brick building, despite being scorched, acted as a firewall that saved the remaining hardware inventory, making Mr. Lowe a very happy man.
“The new steamer paid for itself Sunday evening. The wisdom of the late council cropped out conspicuously in that particular.”
This 1890 fire highlights the precarious nature of early boomtown construction, where 'frame buildings' were essentially tinderboxes. Today, Yakima's historic preservation ordinances for the downtown district exist in direct response to the vulnerability of the city's early wooden architecture.
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