The Great Seattle 'Hard Times' of 1885
As local businesses scrambled to collect debts and residents bartered farm goods for services, Seattle residents looked at the nation’s economic slump and wondered if they could weather the storm.
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.
Merely to show the present similarity in general on this upper coast, and that it is not the effect of any local cause, we append the paragraphs following, clipped from exchanges during the past week: The hard times are not altogether an unmixed evil. While we suffer inconvenience and even endure privations that we would gladly avoid, and while we may not be able to see one pleasant gleam of light through the financial darkness, yet the plucky, energetic man will, through his efforts and enforced privations, come some days out of it with a competence that would otherwise be denied him, by the habits of economy and industry acquired in his struggle to make both ends meet during the hard times. We realize that we are eating up our own means, and, what is worse, at least three-quarters of the small business of the city has got to go to the wall. The very best men are going to be driven out. The men who have the most enterprise are the ones who will get out first. Then the gainers and the old fogies will have a good opportunity to run the town to suit themselves. If we would like to continue if we can, but if we have got to keep up paying more for rent than they are able to make, the sheriff will put them out soon enough. Portland has never been as hard hit as this. The extortion of landlords has always taken all the gains, and these times it is taking the living.
“The extortion of landlords has always taken all the gains, and these times it is taking the living.”
This report from 1885 captures a sentiment that rings familiar in modern Seattle: the crushing pressure of high commercial rents during a period of economic uncertainty, and the fear that 'hard times' will displace the city's most energetic and creative small businesses, leaving only those with deep pockets.
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