The Real Estate Pitch That Conquered West Seattle
A booster-era advertisement uses high-flown, flowery prose to compare the views of West Seattle to the Swiss Alps, aiming to sell lots in a burgeoning new neighborhood.
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.
Our Seattle friends, we trust, will pardon a stranger within their gates offering this gratuitous advice, as we take an exceptional interest in the truly magnificent surroundings of this growing 'West End' and must risk being considered 'gushing' in our praise by some, and 'cheeky' in our unsought advice by others. We must excuse ourselves by saying that we have inspected this coast from Alaska to the Mexican border; have seen the sun rise on the Alps, and have revelled in the beauties of Lucerne from the summit of Rigi; we have felt the soft influence of the Mediterranean and delighted in the castle-fringed banks of the glorious Rhine. We have sought out and admired the finest scenery of the Old World and the New, but from no one spot have we been so impressed with the beauty of the landscape as with that viewed from the table-land of West Seattle. It is simply sublime. On one side of you, the majestic Rainier points his hoary crest into the very heavens. In his grandeur, like a very god, his massive front of 14,444 feet seems to dwarf into pigmies the mountains that would else be giants. In front of you, Mount Baker, another white and glistening monster, thrusts himself upon your vision, whilst right and left of you the Cascade and Olympic ranges form a background of the most exquisite mouldings that the mind of man can contrive, wild and rugged in their outline and ever changeful in their soft and glorious tints.
“From no one spot have we been so impressed with the beauty of the landscape as with that viewed from the table-land of West Seattle. It is simply sublime.”
This 1889 advertisement perfectly captures the birth of Seattle's 'booster' culture, using the same hyperbolic language still found in luxury real estate listings today. While the specific geography of West Seattle has transformed from wild table-land to a densely populated urban peninsula, the commodification of the 'view' remains a central pillar of the city's housing economy.
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