Unemployment and Drink: A Death at Tacoma’s Palace Lodging House
P. N. Taylor, out of work and struggling with liquor, cut his throat beside his wife at Eleventh Street and Tacoma Avenue; he died three hours later.
Suffering from the effects of excessive indulgence in liquor, and worried by inability to procure employment, P. N. Taylor walked into his room in the Palace Lodging House, at Eleventh Street and Tacoma Avenue, last evening, and while standing at the side of his wife cut his throat from ear to ear, and three hours later he was a corpse. He came from Nebraska three years ago.
“worried by inability to procure employment”
Taylor’s death is a reminder that unemployment and addiction were as lethal in 1891 as they are now, and that newspapers once printed such private tragedies as routine neighborhood news. Tacoma had no safety net to catch a man who had come west three years earlier looking for work.
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