The Ghost Ships of Lake Union
After sitting idle since the Great War, a fleet of wooden hulls will be burned for salvage, with their deckhouses repurposed into makeshift homes.
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.
During the next few months, 16 of the wooden hulls, which have been lying idle in Lake Union since the termination of the World War, are to be consigned to the flames. The vessels will be towed to a sandspit at Richmond Beach, five at a time, and they will be burned for the pipe and metal in the hulls. The newly organized Sea Salvage and Wrecking Company, of Seattle, capitalized for $50,000, has purchased the vessels from the Equitable Transportation Company of San Francisco. The large quantities of pipe and metals salvaged will be sold. By the liberal use of chemicals, the wood of the hulls will be destroyed, even the water-soaked timbers in the bottoms of the vessels. Before the vessels are set on fire, the deckhouses will be removed and will be available for use as dwellings, houseboats and clubhouses. They are very roomy and can be easily converted into dwellings.
“Before the vessels are set on fire the deckhouses will be removed and will be available for use as dwellings.”
These wooden hulls were leftovers from a massive wartime shipbuilding boom that suddenly ended. Today, as Seattle faces acute housing shortages, the idea of repurposing industrial scraps into 'roomy' dwellings resonates with modern efforts to find creative housing solutions, even if the scale of our current crisis far exceeds these 1920s salvage attempts.
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