The Great Fire of 1889: Seattle’s Retail Phoenix
After the Great Seattle Fire leveled the city’s business district, Toklas, Singerman Co. rebuilt their massive dry-goods emporium, vowing to anchor the city’s economic recovery.
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.
Races, nations, and towns are all alike subject to that combination of circumstances which men have pleased to call a crisis. The natural law has always shown that at such a juncture the weak succumb, while the fittest survive and gain strength by the experience. Our former palatial establishment, with its wealth of goods—the accumulations of years of toil and industry—is a thing of the past. RESURGAMUS—we will rise again. We have already partially arisen. We have constructed a mammoth, temporary store, covering an area of 10,000 square feet on the ground floor, and in this we will do business until the spring trade begins, when we expect to enter our new building on the former site, corner of Columbia and Front streets. In our temporary building, corner of Third and Madison, we have now on exhibition $200,000 of goods excelling in variety, quality, style and value anything ever shown in Seattle. We have determined to secure and hold the wholesale trade of the Northwest, as well as the best retail trade of Seattle, Tacoma and the adjoining country. The crucial test of fire to which we were recently subjected has proved a new era in prices, as well as a broadening of the field of our operations.
“The natural law has always shown that at such a juncture the weak succumb, while the fittest survive and gain strength by the experience.”
This 1889 advertisement captures the raw ambition of a city literally rising from its own ashes. Just as Seattle’s current tech-driven boom constantly reshapes its skyline, the post-fire era relied on 'resurgamus' energy to transform a burned-out port into a major metropolis.
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