Tragedy at the Occidental Hotel
A pre-dawn fire at a downtown boarding house kills a resident and leaves others fighting for their lives in the smoke.
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.
At fifteen minutes past three o’clock yesterday morning, an alarm was sounded from No. 1 engine house. Residents rushed from their beds to find a large structure on Washington Street in flames. The building, the Hotel Occidental, was a cheap boarding and lodging house well-filled with laborers. The flames gained such headway that lodgers on the upper stories were cut off from the stairways, forcing several to jump from windows to escape. Dan McKenna, Chief of the Fire Department, rushed up the burning stairs through suffocating smoke to rescue Phil Peterson, who was badly burned. A man named Erik Johnson was pulled from the building but expired within minutes. Later, a man named Ed Gurney was found on his burning bed, having been literally roasted alive. Dr. E. L. Smith and Dr. Kincaid provided temporary medical relief at a makeshift hospital set up in the Bijou Theatre. Erik Johnson, a Swedish carpenter, was the sole fatality of the blaze.
“The charred remains still stand as a monument to the efficiency of the Seattle fire department, and the efficacy of the Spring Hill water supply.”
The Occidental Hotel fire highlights the extreme vulnerability of Seattle’s early working-class boarding houses, which were often death traps due to lack of fire escapes and flammable construction. Today, the tension over fire safety in single-room occupancy buildings continues to echo in modern debates regarding housing code enforcement and the displacement of low-income tenants.
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