The End of Wooden Seattle
A historic property deal marks a turning point as Seattle trades its 'dilapidated, squatty, and dangerous' wooden storefronts for modern, multi-story brick architecture.
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.
John Leary, Esq., bought a triangular piece of ground on the corner of Mill and Front streets yesterday, containing 2,800 square feet, for which he paid H. L. Yesler the sum of twenty thousand dollars. On this site will be erected one of the finest buildings on the northwest coast. It will be very much the same style of a structure as the Second National Bank Building of Pittsburg, Pa., three stories high with a basement. Kaufman's shoe-store, Benedict & Co.'s book-store and Puget Sound Telegraph Office, W. H. Howard's barber shop, C. F. Cosper's store, Naher's jewelry emporium, and the old Keinig building will all have to be torn down or moved away to make room for the more imposing structure. The day of wooden buildings for business purposes in Seattle has gone by, and the more elegant and commodious brick structures are rapidly replacing their dilapidated, squatty, dangerous and almost disgraceful fore-runners.
“The day of wooden buildings for business purposes in Seattle has gone by.”
The transition from wood to brick in 1882 mirrors today's intense push for density and permanent, modern construction in downtown Seattle. The 'disgraceful' temporary shacks of the frontier era were the 19th-century equivalent of the surface parking lots and aging low-rise buildings that developers aim to replace today.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.