The Purging of 'Whitechapel'
The Seattle City Council and local newspapers clash over the city’s attempt to erase a notorious downtown red-light district from the map.
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.
The city council of Seattle has wiped out by fiat the name 'Whitechapel,' a purlieu in the heart of that place that would outrival for vice the vilest precinct of the old New York 'Five Points' in its rottenest days. The Seattle city council requests the newspapers to cease calling the sin-swamped purlieus of the city 'Whitechapel.' The name is nothing; the fact is all. The newspapers might call it 'Paradise Lost,' or anything else, and the tract in question would smell as loud.
“The name is nothing; the fact is all. The newspapers might call it 'Paradise Lost,' or anything else, and the tract in question would smell as loud.”
In 1891, Seattle officials tried to sanitize the city's reputation by renaming the 'Whitechapel' district, a tactic of displacement through branding that echoes today's debates over neighborhood redevelopment and the aesthetic scrubbing of Seattle's gritty urban legacy.
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