The 'Little Hatchets' of Commercial Street
Vandals are destroying shade trees in downtown Seattle, prompting local residents to demand authorities intervene against the neighborhood boys.
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.
A number of citizens residing on the lower part of Commercial Street and in the vicinity of Plummer’s Point complain of hoodlum boys who appear to be afflicted with a mania for cutting and girdling shade trees. Several trees in that portion of our town have been ruined by 'little hatchets' in the hands of those youngsters, and for this there is no redress but in an appeal to the authorities. It is quite time that an example was made of some of these boys and a stop put to this mischievous practice.
“Several trees in that portion of our town have been ruined by 'little hatchets' in the hands of those youngsters.”
While Seattle today grapples with high-profile conflicts over urban canopy loss and development, this 1877 report captures a more prosaic, yet equally contentious, struggle: the tension between local youth behavior and the preservation of neighborhood aesthetics in a rapidly expanding frontier town.
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