A Tragic Fall on a Sidehill Cottage
An eight-year-old girl, Esther Young, died after falling from a porch window in Tacoma.
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.
Esther Young, aged eight, daughter of Charles N. Young, while visiting with her parents at the home of John H. Smith this evening, climbed out onto a snow-covered porch. Slipping off, she fell twenty feet, landing on her head. She lived forty minutes, but did not regain consciousness. Esther had always lived in a cottage and was used to climbing out on the porch on the first floor. The Smith children warned her not to climb out of the window, and their home is on a sidehill, the back part being built very high.
“Esther had always lived in a cottage and was used to climbing out on the porch on the first floor.”
Tacoma’s steep topography—the 'sidehill'—has always created dangerous architecture. This story serves as a stark reminder of the perils of residential development on uneven ground, a challenge still present in modern Seattle and Tacoma.
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