The Struggle for a Fire-Proof Seattle
In 1876, a local editor warns that Seattle’s reliance on wood-frame architecture is a dangerous gamble for a growing city.
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.
Probably in no town in the country of equal size with ours are there fewer fire-proof buildings. It is a matter of some surprise that Seattle should have a population of 3,000 or 4,000 inhabitants with but four fire-proof buildings all told. This year the number is to be increased but two more, so far as we know with certainty, the jail and one business house. The time is not far distant, if not already at hand, when expedience, if not necessity, will dictate the erection of good brick or stone buildings along our thronged business streets. Such buildings will prove paying investments, not only in their greater intrinsic value, but in their greater security, and lower insurance, in the character and stability they will give to the town, which will be felt in the way of attracting population and business from abroad, and in enhancing the value of all city real estate. It is observable that in nearly all the old towns of this coast, that were built upon temporary mining excitements, the business streets were built up solidly with brick and mortar, whilst there are almost none in Seattle, the springs of whose growth are of the slowest and most permanent kind, viz., coal, timber, shipbuilding and agriculture.
“The time is not far distant, if not already at hand, when expedience, if not necessity, will dictate the erection of good brick or stone buildings along our thronged business streets.”
This 1876 editorial identifies a tension between rapid growth and long-term infrastructure that remains the core of Seattle’s civic identity. While Seattle eventually transitioned to stone and brick, the city’s current struggle to replace older, vulnerable structures with modern, sustainable, and affordable housing echoes this nineteenth-century plea for 'stable' growth.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.