WHAT A WONDERFUL FILRE IT WAS – SEATTLE – 1889
Karen I Treiger
HAVING A WONDERFUL FIRE. WISH YOU WERE HERE!
Seattle’s “wonderful fire” arrived on the afternoon of June 6, 1889. It started with an overturned glue pot in the basement of a building on 1st and Madison. It grew to inferno that ripped through Seattle’s business district.
(Photo: Seattle Fire – 1st Ave. 30 min. after it started – UW Special Collections UW2730)
“Within minutes,” Costello writes in his History of Seattle’s First Department Store, Toklas & Singerman, “the flames spread from the carpenter shop to adjoining rooms, then to the entire Denny Block in which the fire originated. Long tongues of flames leaped high into the sky. The air soon darkened with the billowing smoke, through which a former kindly sun now shone red and angry.” (Costello Manuscript)
The flames left nothing behind but a few stray walls and lots of ash. Seattle suffered $15 million in loss ($436 million in today’s dollars). My earliest Seattle ancestor, Paul Singerman’s four story “fire-proof” brick mercantile store on 1st and Columbia, the San Francisco Store, was incinerated down to the last belt buckle. Paul emigrated to the United States from a small town in what is now NE Poland, made his way west to San Francisco and then, in 1874, north to Seattle to try his luck in this pioneer town.
(Photo: Looking West on 1st between Columbia & Cherry. UW Special Collections, UW41285)
“In little more than an hour,” Costello describes, “the entire structure [of the San Francisco Store] and its stocks were a raging inferno, and soon a mass of ruins, flaming and smoking, so completely razed that only a portion of the south walls remained standing” (Costello Manuscript).
When the Fire was finished, writes Murray Morgan in Skid Road, “every wharf, every mill from Union to Jackson Streets, was gone” (Skid Road, 119).
Singerman’s losses, just from the stock inside the San Francisco store amounted to $500,000 ($14.5 million in today’s dollars).
(Photo: Singerman’s Store before Fire. MOHAI, William Newton Photograph Bob. 5.41)
Wonderful? How is this wonderful?
The declaration of having a wonderful fire was not made in 1889, but with years of hindsight in 1967. It was made by Bill Speidel in his funny and informative book, Sons of the Profits. (See Speidel, 238, 240)
I actually understand why the fire was indeed wonderful.
- Fresh Start
- Timing
- Sewage
FRESH START
In 1851 a few white Europeans (known as the Denny Party) settled on the shores of Puget Sound and called the place Seattle. Most of the buildings were put up in a hurry and built with lumber produced at Yesler’s Mill, the centerpiece and main employer of the town.
Until Seattle’s Great Fire, C.H. Hanford writes in Seattle and Environs, “Seattle was a shack town. In lieu of pavement the streets having to bear heavy traffic were planked. The Occidental Hotel, a four-story brick building; Frye’s Opera house; the Yesler-Leary three-story building and about a dozen others were the only brick buildings. The burned area was well covered with cheap wooden buildings occupied by hotels, restaurants, saloons, workshops and retail stores. Sawmills and factories and the coal bunkers were located along the waterfront south of where the fire
(Photo: Seattle 1878 – 1st Ave (Pioneer Square). UW Special Collection, UW5894)
With the “shack town” vaporized, the city’s residents could start anew. Six hundred townspeople met the next day, June 7th, and agreed – no more wooden buildings in the downtown corridor. (History of Seattle, 426; Speidel, 241-42).
“Magnificent office and mercantile buildings of brick and stone took the place of low frame structures;” writes Bagley in The History of Seattle, “narrow lanes became broad business thoroughfares and all the unsightly places shone with civic attractiveness.” (History of Seattle, 419)
My great-great-great grandfather, Paul Singerman re-opened his magnificent store exactly one year after the fire, June 6, 1890. Thousands of people flooded the store on opening day to see the beautiful building, the new invention of the elevator, the combination of gas and electric lights and the huge amount of merchandise for sale.
(Photo: Rebuilt Toklas & Singerman Store 1890 – MOHAI, William Newton Photographs)
This fresh start allowed Seattle to build a real city with sturdy buildings, wider, paved streets and some city planning and set the stage for rapid growth. “The population,” writes C.H. Hanford, “according to the census of 1890 was 42,837, which was more than eleven times the number of inhabitants in 1880.” (Seattle and Environs, 219)
Icing on the cake -the Fire killed 1 million rats.
TIMING
Seattle’s Great Fire got a huge amount of press, nationally and internationally, garnering $120,000 ($3.5 million in today’s dollars) in relief from all around the globe (Speidel, 238-39). It was just lucky that there was no other big that week.
Two weeks after Seattle’s Fire, June 22, 1889, Vancouver, Washington had a devastating fire. It received minimal press coverage and aid money did not flow. Seattle’s fire had taken up all the air in the room. Further, on August 4, Spokane had a fire that got out of hand because “the only guy who knew how to run their brand new water system was away on a picnic.” (Speidel, 239). It didn’t receive much press either.
If Seattle’s fire had been five days earlier, on June 1 instead of June 6, there would have been little press coverage. That’s because on May 31, 1889, a dam on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River failed, causing a flood that killed 2,200 in Johnstown, PA, after (Wikipedia Johnstown Flood; Speidel). That story had the printing presses busy.
“As it was,” Speidel writes, “our [Fire] was just right” (Id.).
SEWAGE
Sewage is not something discussed in middle school’s Washington State History class, but it was a huge problem in early Seattle. Before the Fire, a person “had to climb a ladder to use the plumbing facilities in the heart of Seattle’s main business district.” (Speidel 238). Seattle’s Health Officer, Dr. Edward Loomis, warned the city officials about the sewage problem some six years earlier. The problem, he explained is that in the business district, at the bottom of the steep hills, the “sewers flushed in reverse twice a day when the tide came in.” (Id.)
(Photo: View of Seattle from Beacon Hill 1881 MOHAI, Pic. #1983.10.6089)
So, with the whole city destroyed, it was the perfect opportunity to fix this problem. The solution was to build the city on higher ground. This is why Seattle streets are 10-18 feet higher than they were before the fire. City engineers used a combination of trestles and arches to support the elevated streets. A series of skylights were built into the new streets so that a bit of natural light would seep into the tunnels below.
(Photo: Karen Treiger & Sheldon Goldberg – underground tunnels, 2022)
Seattle’s Great Fire, a centerpiece of Seattle’s history, turned out to be one its greatest blessing. Some eight years after the Fire, Speidel writes, “the sewers were behaving the way any properly raised sewers should behave. Pioneer Square was the hub of electrified transportation from all parts of the city. Streets and sidewalks were immaculate. Window boxes of flowers abounded. Well-dressed men and women strolled about and acknowledged one another with polite nods” (Speidel, 254).
What a wonderful fire.
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Karen Treiger is the author of My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story (2018) and author of the upcoming book, Standing on the Crack: The Legacy of Five Jewish Families from Seattle’s Gilded Age.
Her website is: Homepage – Karen Treiger – Author
Her weekly blog about the history of Seattle and stories about her ancestors can be found here: Ancestry, Genealogy, Legacy, History: Stories of Five Jewish Families in Seattle
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SOURCES:
Bagley, Clarence B, History of Seattle: From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volumes I, II & III. Chicago, The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company (1916)
Costello, Gilbert, S., Manuscript History of Seattle’s First Department Store, Embracing San Francisco Store, Toklas & Singerman, MacDougall & Southwick (1924).
Hanford, C. H., Seattle and Environs 1852-1924, Vol. III, Seattle, Pioneer Historical Publishing Co. (1924).
Johnstown Flood, Wikipedia: Johnstown Flood – Wikipedia
Morgan, Murray, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle. University of Washington Press – Seattle (1951, newest edition – 2018).
Speidel, William, C., Sons of the Profits or, There’s No Business Like Grow Business! The Seattle Story, 1851-1901, Nettle Creek Publishing Company, Seattle (1967).