SEATTLE, CITY OF VICE.

By Karen Treiger

(Klondikers carrying supplies ascending the Chilkoot Pass, 1898)

The discovery of gold in Alaska set off a period of vibrant economic growth in Seattle.  The money that flowed through Seattle during the years of the Alaska Gold Rush stimulated the city’s merchants and businessmen to expand.  By 1905, when the Klondike Gold Rush had pretty much petered out, Seattle businesses were in control of 90% of ships that traveled back and forth to Alaska.

(Photo: S. S. Humbolt, ready to sail from Seattle to Nome during the 1901 gold rush, Photo by Asahel Curtis, UW Special Collections (TRA511))

The gold business shifted to the salmon business. Fresh Alaskan salmon was, and still is, a huge seller all up and down the Pacific Coast.  However, canned salmon became the successor to the gold that flowed southward into the continental U.S.  The salmon arrived in Seattle and was shipped by rail to all parts of the country.

Seattle, in the early 20^th century, after the Gold Rush saw a burst of people moving here. The Census count of Seattle’s population in 1910 was 237,000 (194% increase from 1900).  On top of that, between 10,000 and 15,000 more people lived in Seattle for some part of the year.  For example, those that passed through on the way to Alaska, the seasonal migrants who worked in logging camps, mills, farms in Eastern Washington and those who worked in canneries in Alaska. (Berner, 32)

The economic growth followed the population and there was a boom in Seattle. Many businesses were thriving. Among the businesses that thrived during this period was the “Vice” business.

Richard Berner, in his book Seattle 1900-1920: From boomtown, through urban turbulence, to restoration, describes Seattle at the turn of the 20^th century as a city full of vice and corruption. When covering the 1911 recall election, McClure’s Magazine wrote:

“‘There arose in Seattle a small coterie of tenderloin capitalist – men who cultivated vice intensively and organized it in a way to wring from it the largest profits.’  According to a recent report of the Federal Immigration, [McClure’s] continued, Seattle was ‘one of the headquarters of the white slave trade.’” (Berner, 29)

To paint the picture even further, Berner quotes more of the McClure Magazine article:

“The city seemed to have been transformed almost magically into one great gambling hell.  All kinds of games simultaneously started up, in full public view.  Cigar stores and barbershops did a lively business in crap-shooting and race-track gambling, drawing their patronage largely from schoolboys and department store girls.  . . . All over the city ‘flat joints’, pay-off stations, and dart-shooting galleries were reaping a rapid harvest . . .  in the thirty or forty gambling-places opened under the administration of Hi Gill.”  (referring to Mayor Hiram Gill)

With all this money to be made in the “vice” business, two Seattle businessmen, Mr. Tupper and Mr. Gerald, built a huge brothel on Beacon Hill.  These men needed additional land to build the brothel, so Gill’s city council leased them eighty adjoining acres of city land.  The editor of the Post Intelligencer wrote that “Gillisim” (a term coined for actions under Hiram Gill’s administration) “has allowed the enforcers of law and order to enter into lewd partnership with breakers of the law. . .  It has fostered and encouraged a species of government and official favoritism wholly at variance with the sprit and genus of American political institutions and American law.” (Berner, citing the PI, 73)

(Photo: 500 room brothel on Beacon Hill, built during the Hiram Gill administration, 1910, HistoryLink.Org, UW Special Collections (UW8235)).

Reading these descriptions of Seattle makes me wonder what my ancestors thought about all this.  By 1911 when Mayor Hiram Gill was recalled, Paul and Jenny Singerman had been in Seattle for three decades and were a well-established and respected family. Victor Staadecker and the Friedlander family were relative newcomers to Seattle, having arrived six and five years earlier.  Did they vote for the recall of Mayor Gill?   A vote for recall meant a rejection of the flourishing vice business and the corrupt Police force that fostered and allowed it. I don’t know.

Chayim Leib Steinberg arrived with his son Sam in 1910, right in the middle of all this craziness, with the rest of the family arriving in 1911.   With their Jewish religious way of life and lack of English language skills, I imagine they didn’t have a clue what was going on.   

By this time, Seattle was a mixture of many cultures – Whites of European descent, Japanese, Chinese, African Americans, and Jews.  The populations lived (mostly) separately but they joined together to make Seattle the place it is today. 

This brings us back to the beginning – the Alaska Gold Rush brought the city together and became the engine of economic expansion that led to Seattle’s future growth and development. The Gold Rush set the stage for future business success and for the city we live in today. Seattle’s mix of people from different cultures enriches life for everyone.   

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 Vibrant Gilded Age (Publication date 8/12/25).

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

SOURCE:

Berner, Richard, Seattle 1900-1920: From boomtown, through urban turbulence, to restoration.