The Great Seattle Building Boom of 1888
A meticulously logged list of nearly 1,500 structures built in a single year, revealing a city transforming from a frontier outpost into a bustling metropolis.
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 recent progress of Seattle finds another illustration no less notable and positive than that afforded by the building record during the last twelve months. The list herewith printed has been compiled by a diligent personal canvass from street to street, and house to house, and it is absolutely complete and correct. The number of buildings of all kinds erected during the year ending yesterday was 1,447, and their cost $3,400,000. Street improvements cost $168,776. A cable street-railway line four miles in length and connecting the city front with Lake Washington was equipped and put in operation at a cost of $300,000. The total cost of the several departments of substantial improvements reaches the large amount of $3,615,776, a sum greater, we confidently believe, than any other city north of San Francisco.
“The list herewith printed has been compiled by a diligent personal canvass from street to street, and house to house, and it is absolutely complete and correct.”
In 1888, Seattle was experiencing a feverish construction boom as it pivoted toward the coming century. This obsession with rapid housing development and transit infrastructure remains the defining, and often contentious, narrative of Seattle’s modern urban planning.
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