The Bold Heist at the Washington Hotel
Thieves in Seattle cracked a 500-pound safe in broad daylight after rolling it from the city's finest hotel.
Seattle: Cracksmen forced an entrance into the barroom of the Washington Hotel at 2 a.m. this morning and removed a safe weighing 500 pounds. They rolled it down a hill, a distance of a block, where they blew it open in broad daylight. The explosion attracted many people, but the robbers escaped, obtaining the contents. The Washington is the remodeled Denny hotel, the finest hotel in the city. It sheltered President Roosevelt during his recent visit here.
“They removed a safe weighing 500 pounds and rolled it down a hill, a distance of a block, where they blew it open in broad daylight.”
The Washington Hotel was a crown jewel of early Seattle, a site of high-society lodging that now exists only in the city's archival memory. The audacity of rolling a half-ton safe down a city block in broad daylight highlights the chaotic, unpoliced nature of early 20th-century urban expansion, where infrastructure struggled to keep pace with the ambitions of both developers and thieves.
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