The Boom-Time Promises of Brooklyn, Seattle
A 19th-century real estate advertisement paints a picture of a rapidly inflating Seattle and the hopeful, speculative fervor surrounding the Lake Union district.
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.
Don't act foolish any longer, but listen to a word of free advice. In the past four years, Seattle has grown from a village of 4,000 inhabitants to a city of over 50,000 people. Within the next four years, Seattle will have 150,000 souls. Real estate has doubled and quadrupled in the last three or four years, and will more than do so in the next two or three years. The rich men of Seattle today are those who secured real estate and held on to it. Are not such examples safe to follow? Any business man in the city who is posted will tell you that Lake Union property is just as good as gold, and of all the choice spots around Lake Union, Brooklyn is the choicest. Because of its beautiful location on a gentle slope, reaching down to the water's edge, prices are very low. Improvements are now extensive; $40,000 is being spent in building fine houses; $5,000 in grading and sidewalking streets; $10,000 in cleaning and beautifying the grounds. Electric car lines will reach Brooklyn in sixty days. These improvements, with others going on, soon will send prices away up.
“The rich men of Seattle today are those who secured real estate and held on to it. Are not such examples safe to follow?”
The 'Brooklyn' mentioned here is the old name for the area now known as the University District. This 1891 advertisement captures the exact same rhetoric of 'explosive growth' and 'unmissable investment' that has defined Seattle’s real estate market for over 130 years, proving that the city's obsession with land speculation as a path to wealth is a historic tradition.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.