After the Great Fire, Seattle Faced a Crisis of Shelter
With the city center in ashes, temporary lodging became the most pressing demand for a bustling frontier town.
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.
Very important parties in Seattle are suffering through the lack of a hotel. If we except two or three lodging houses of small capacity, there is now no hotel in Seattle south of Belltown. This fact is keeping away from the city scores and hundreds of persons whose comfort is of the highest importance. We are inviting capitalists and business men to come, but we cannot offer them the means of spending even a few days here. It is a common thing for drummers and others who wish to visit Seattle to stop at the Tacoma hotels, coming over for a few hours during the day. Something must be done to relieve a situation so damaging to the city. We must have a place to entertain strangers. It need not be grand in any way, but it must be a place where visitors can live in tolerable comfort. It will not do to wait for the Denny hotel, for it will not be ready for ten months at the earliest. In the meantime there should be built a temporary hotel of large capacity, to meet the immediate and pressing demand. If the right people will take hold of this matter, a sufficient building of wood can be put up and furnished within fifty days. The need is urgent. Will not somebody move in the matter?
“Something must be done to relieve a situation so damaging to the city. We must have a place to entertain strangers.”
Published just weeks after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, this plea for temporary housing captures the city's frantic efforts to rebuild. It echoes a recurring theme in Seattle's history: a city so desperate for space that even the most basic emergency housing becomes a central pillar of economic survival.
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