The Ghostly Tenements of Early Seattle
Before the city’s rapid transformation, Seattle’s housing market was a landscape of cramped, 'little rooms upstairs' and boarding house advertisements catering to the transient laborer.
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.
To my waiting heart, they fly, from the golden gates so fair, to my waiting heart, they fly, from the loved one gone away; still in dreams I see her face and the happy smile it wears, but not to find her place in that little room upstairs. Through the night hours drear and long, were the watchful spirits there, did she bear their welcome song, stealing down the darkened sky? When the golden gates are swinging wide, could they be or heed my prayer? I remember that she died in the little room upstairs. Will she come no more to stray in the paths our feet shall press? O the bright hopes laid away with each dainty, half-worn dress. Fashioned now in fairer lands are the robes my darling wears; there are empty hearts and hands in that little room upstairs.
“There are empty hearts and hands in that little room upstairs.”
This 1877 poem, juxtaposed with advertisements for $6-a-week room rentals, captures the precariousness of domestic space in frontier Seattle. Much like today, the 'little room upstairs' served as both a sanctuary and a symbol of fleeting residency for those caught in the churn of a rapidly growing, industrial port city.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.