A Bicycle Plunge from the Grant Street Bridge
A young cyclist was sent over the edge of the bridge by a narrow guardrail, plummeting onto the tide flats below.
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.
What might well have been a fatal accident happened to Will Inglis, a lad about 18 years of age, yesterday evening. He and his bicycle fell from the Grant street bridge, a distance of twenty-four feet, into the mud below. Luckily it was low tide at the time and the tide flats were exposed. Young Inglis and two comrades, Rush McCargar and H. N. Foy, had gone out for a bicycle trip and were riding along the footway on the outside of the Grant street bridge. When they were opposite the electric light station young Inglis rode too close to a six-inch scantling that served as a guard for the outer edge of the footway. The machine that he was riding was a safety, and the pedal in descending struck upon the top of this rail and lifted the machine and rider up into the air and over the edge of the bridge. The boy was taken to his home at 518 McClaire street. A physician who was called in reported that no bones were broken, and that owing to the soft mud into which he had fallen no internal injuries were likely to result.
“the pedal in descending struck upon the top of this rail and lifted the machine and rider up into the air and over the edge of the bridge.”
Grant Street was a major thoroughfare and trestle structure that once carried traffic over the industrial tidelands of Seattle. This story captures the precarious nature of early 1890s infrastructure in the city, before the extensive regrading and industrial filling projects transformed the waterfront.
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