The Siege of Commercial Street
A routine arrest of a sailor in a Seattle lodging house escalates into a pitched battle between police and the neighborhood’s residents.
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.
Officer J. S. Slater met the South Commercial street gang last night and as a result, Ed McClellan lies in the hospital with a fractured skull. Slater had attempted to arrest a sailor for drunkenness near the Evans lodging house when McClellan began to interfere. When Slater tried to make an arrest, McClellan ran upstairs into the building, followed by the officer. A pitched battle ensued in which the other occupants of the room fought off the officer, eventually driving him out of the house. Slater blew his whistle for reinforcements and returned with three other officers to 'carry the fort.' They succeeded in taking McClellan, who was found to be unconscious, to the police station. It was later determined he suffered a fractured skull. The report notes that this stretch of Commercial street has a long history of volatile confrontations between police and the local 'drinking element.'
“With this reinforcement the fort was carried and McClellan was taken to the police station on a stretcher.”
This incident reflects the fraught history of policing in Seattle's waterfront and Skid Road districts, where police-community tensions were often settled with physical force long before modern oversight mechanisms existed.
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