The Judge and the Minstrel Show
When a visiting Chief Justice toured a Seattle courtroom in 1878, he was shocked by the advertisements for a traveling minstrel show plastered on the courthouse walls.
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.
While the steamer Dakota was lying in the harbor on Sunday, Judge Gray, Chief Justice of British Columbia, who was visiting our city, expressed a desire to visit the local courtroom. He was taken to Yesler's Hall, where court was being held, and shown all through the building. Upon leaving, the Judge turned and gazed for a moment at the huge, colorful posters plastered all over the front of the building—advertisements for the Haverly Minstrels—and ventured this inquiry: 'Is it customary in America to place the portraits of judges and attorneys on the outside of the courthouses?' It is unnecessary to state the matter was sufficiently explained to the Judge, so that he might not depart with such an erroneous idea in his head.
“Is it customary in America to place the portraits of judges and attorneys on the outside of the courthouses?”
This 1878 anecdote highlights the makeshift, multi-purpose nature of early Seattle civic space, where the dignity of the law literally collided with the garish commercialism of the era’s traveling entertainment. Even then, Seattle’s visual landscape was a crowded, competing mess of 'official' business and aggressive marketing, a dynamic that remains familiar in our modern, ad-saturated urban corridors.
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