The Great Seattle Housing Boom of 1890
A staggering list of hundreds of building permits filed on the final day of 1890 reveals the rapid, frantic expansion of a city rebuilding itself from the ashes of the Great Fire.
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.
As 1890 drew to a close, the city of Seattle saw an unprecedented surge in construction activity. From the tenements rising in the central districts to the rapid development of neighborhoods like Kirkland, Latona, and Green Lake, the building records for the year capture the physical manifestation of a city in the middle of a massive rebirth. The list includes scores of single-story frame dwellings, multi-story tenements, churches, schoolhouses, and mills, illustrating the infrastructure required to house thousands of new arrivals. Key developments include massive structures like the five-story Denny Hotel on Second and Stewart, the sprawling Columbia school building at Frank and Carrie, and industrial projects such as the Seattle Flouring Mill in Ravenna Park. This document serves as a ledger of a city transitioning from a frontier settlement into a burgeoning metropolis.
“A city in the middle of a massive rebirth.”
This exhaustive list of 1890 permits highlights that Seattle's struggle to keep pace with housing demand is not a modern phenomenon, but a foundational one. Just as this list chronicles the rapid construction of tenements and houses to accommodate growth after the 1889 fire, today's headlines are defined by the same desperate race to build enough density to support the city's expanding population.
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