A Night in the Variety District Ends in a $100 Robbery
A steamboat man follows a woman from a South Third Street dive, and police seize a familiar underworld figure and his companion.
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.
Jack McKenna and a woman called Tillie Gilmore are locked up at police headquarters on the charge of robbing John Linder, a steamboat man, of $100 in the Kinnear block on South Third street. Linder was enjoying himself in the district south of Yesler avenue and met the woman at the New Zealand variety dive. He claims to have gone to Tillie Gilmore's room and before morning to have been robbed of his money. McKenna, who is supposed to have been the woman's accomplice in the affair, is well known in this city for dirty work. His character is bad, even in the estimation of the bad.
McKenna is the man who made an affidavit to the effect that he had seen Bolton Rogers in the Colorado penitentiary, which he afterwards admitted to be false. He is also the man who brought Gertie Grant here from San Francisco under promise of marriage, but in reality for purposes the paper described as immoral. She died about three years ago in the doorway of the Golden State hotel.
“"His character is bad, even in the estimation of the bad."”
The old "variety district" south of Yesler was Seattle's entertainment and vice quarter, a place the papers watched closely and often described through the era's moral judgments. Today the same blocks are part of a changing downtown, but the tension between nightlife, policing and who gets believed in a robbery complaint is still familiar.
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