Tragedy at the Tremont Hotel
A morning boiler explosion at a five-story hotel left multiple dead and injured, rattling the foundations of downtown Seattle.
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.
A terrible catastrophe occurred in this city at half-past five o'clock this morning. One of the boilers of the Tremont Hotel exploded, instantly killing a number of persons and injuring several others, doing great damage to the hotel and neighboring property. The killed are as follows: Mrs. Laurence Carr, a white woman, and her two children. The sound from the explosion was appalling. The Tremont Hotel is a large five-story brick structure with 180 feet frontage on Front Street and about the same extent on Columbia Street. The explosion shook the building with such terrible force that the guests thought a tremendous earthquake had occurred, and ran panic-stricken about the hallways. The scene of the accident is a dreary spectacle. Not one brick of the boiler house remains upon another, but they are scattered about for half a square.
“The explosion shook the building with such terrible force that the guests thought a tremendous earthquake had occurred, and ran panic-stricken about the hallways.”
This 1885 explosion highlights the lethal, unregulated risks of the industrial era in downtown Seattle, where high-pressure steam power was often wedged into dense, wooden and brick commercial districts. Today, we manage these density risks through strict municipal fire and life-safety codes, yet the terror of a sudden infrastructure failure in a bustling urban core remains a familiar civic anxiety.
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