The Daily Parade of Moral Rottenness
A fed-up Seattle resident petitions City Hall to end the brazen practice of parading sex workers through the city's main streets by carriage and brass band.
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.
Seattle, March 26, 1889. To the Editor: Your brief editorial of this morning, referring to the daily parade on our streets of abandoned men and women, is manly and to the point. My office is so situated that I get all the noise and nausea arising from these parades on every occasion. It seems to me this thing has got to be an unbearable nuisance, viewed from either a business or moral standpoint. It does not impress favorably the hundreds of people coming here every day seeking homes, to see every public hack, carriage, landau, and Gurney loaded down with courtesans parading our main streets, preceded by a brass band. Only a few days ago, a newcomer in our city, having every appearance of a substantial, good citizen, said to me while viewing one of these demonstrations: 'I have been here some little time—came with the intention of bringing my family here, but I don’t think I want to bring my family in a city where licentious men and dissolute women are allowed to make a public parade every day.' After seeing this thing go on from day to day, week to week, and month to month, the dominant feeling of every good citizen becomes one of indignation, shame, and disgust. He cannot get into one of these vehicles that he has seen so often in these parades without a feeling akin to personal defilement. Our city authorities are now making an effort to abate such nuisances as are offensive to the physical senses or dangerous to the public health. Why not broaden the work a little and turn their attention to this mass of moral rottenness, which is far more dangerous to the community, and if it cannot be exterminated, devise some way to prevent a daily parade of it before our citizens, both old and young, and the stranger within our gates. - O. A. Werd
“He cannot get into one of these vehicles that he has seen so often in these parades without a feeling akin to personal defilement.”
This letter reflects the tension in 1889 Seattle as the city transitioned from a rowdy frontier outpost to an aspiring metropolis. While today we view the author's moralizing as exclusionary, his letter provides a rare, vivid description of the 'open' nature of Seattle's vice district before the city began its long, uneven effort to sanitize its public image.
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