A Fugitive's Christmas at the Palmer House
Gerald Kyre, a guest at a prominent Seattle hotel, finds his holiday season interrupted by a dispatch from New York and the arrival of warrants.
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.
Gerald Kyre, a guest at the Palmer House, was visited today by a deputy sheriff bearing a dispatch from New York, claiming that officers are looking for him with warrants, and that he was charged with having married a woman in the city of New York while an English wife and children were living. When approached, Kyre said: 'I have nothing whatever to say on the subject.' When asked, 'Are you not afraid to go back?' he replied, 'I am not.' When asked if he had any particular information to give, he said, 'I don't care to say anything. I saw the matter in a news item.' A Miss Fuller, who is staying at the same hotel, denies that she is married to Kyre, but admits that they are 'pledged to be married.'
“I don't care to say anything. I saw the matter in a news item.”
This 1885 scandal captures the precarious nature of transient life in early Seattle, where hotel registers were as much for public scrutiny as they were for lodging. The 'Palmer House' mentioned was a central node of city life, mirroring the way contemporary boutique hotels and high-density residential buildings in downtown Seattle remain the stage for private lives crashing into public law.
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