Half-Finished Streets and a Man-Trap on Main: The Tribune Takes the City to Task
On the morning of a council meeting, Olympia's paper catalogues the abandoned plank road, the blocked gutters, the depot sidewalk rotting for two weeks, and a hole in Main Street waiting to cost the city money.
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.
The city council at its meeting tonight ought to do something toward fixing up the odds and ends of botch work all over the city, and put the highways and sidewalks in decent condition for the winter season. The sidewalk leading to the depot, which has been in a dilapidated condition for nearly two weeks, still remains in that condition — an eyesore to strangers passing through as well as to the residents. Main street between 5th and 6th, which the council ordered to be planked, has not been touched and is in a filthy condition. The gutters of Main street in many places are obstructed nearly its whole length south of Seventh street by electric light poles which were taken down some months ago and allowed to remain there. The sidewalk and street on the east side of Main street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth street is fast disappearing into an adjoining lot, which is far below the grade, while on the west side of the same street is a man-trap which will cost the city some money one of these days for damages.
These frayed edges of street work here and there have been apparent to the citizen as well as to the stranger for a long time. It does not appear that anything commenced in this city, in the way of street improvement, is ever finished. There is always something lacking, and a botch look about it. Why cannot the work be done in a substantial manner and completely finished, as it is done in other cities? A good deal of the labor expended, both by contractors and the street commissioner, will have to be done over again. The city council will probably regard this as another "kick" of the Tribune, but we are only echoing the common talk of the people of Olympia.
“It does not appear that anything commenced in this city, in the way of street improvement, is ever finished. There is always something lacking, and a botch look about it.”
Then as now, Olympia's complaints about street work were less about grand plans than about the gap between what the council ordered and what actually got finished. The specific hazards here — a blocked gutter, an unplanked block, a sidewalk sliding into a lower lot — are the 1891 version of the pothole report and the deferred-maintenance list. The paper's closing line, that it is only echoing 'the common talk of the people,' is the perennial defense of every local editorial board.
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