Seattle has faced calamity before and come out stronger - Crosscut

Hardship is nothing new for Seattle. The city we all lived in at the beginning of the year was one that had been rebuilt and reset after numerous disasters, both physical and economic. Normal Seattle has really been a series of new normals sometimes jolted into being out of the wreckage of the old.

In the recoveries of the past, we can find lessons for the post-pandemic city ahead. It is helpful to remember that calamities have inspired innovation, pushed us to take the city to a new level, made way for new technologies and spurred us to address longstanding problems. They’ve reminded us, too, of the need for support, moral and financial. We are not in this alone.

Consider the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, our first great urban calamity. On the eve of Washington statehood, the territory’s biggest town burned to the ground in a single day. Wharves, railroad depots, the entire business district and, it is said, a million rats were consumed. We were a boomtown that went up in flames, with 120 acres — 25 city blocks — of prime real estate torched.

In response to the fire, the community doubled down on its ambitions. A town meeting was held not long after the flames burned out, and the community, businessmen and bankers got together to decide next steps. There was little serious division; people came together in the wake of the disaster. A notable result of the meeting was a commitment from the banks to fund reconstruction — and if they didn’t have the funds, to borrow from bigger banks in bigger cities to get the means to rebuild.

There were a number of problems that contributed to the fire that could be fixed. Permanent wooden buildings were banned from the “fire limits,” the burned area. The new business district would be brick and stone, and stronger. The city instituted its first building code for sturdier and safer buildings. The office of building superintendent was created. Downtown streets would be widened to improve access and keep structures further apart.

Some fixes had nothing to do with the fire. The city’s sewer and stormwater system was fixed so the toilets downtown wouldn’t flush backwards when the tide came in, as they had sometimes done before the fire. That needed to be fixed, fire or no, but the fire boosted the will to tackle that along with the issue of a better water supply.

The fire highlighted a lack of water and water pressure during the fire. In a public vote a month following the fire, citizens approved a public water system, which was expanded in later years. Private operators were bought out. A degree of public ownership — call it socialism, if you wish — gave the city fresh water and a supply system that services us to this day with one of the best municipal water supplies in the world.

Seattle boomed in the following decades and absorbed a tsunami of growth from the 1880s to the 1920s as a result of a gold rush, industrial expansion, a vigorous resource economy, and wartime manufacturing for World War I. But the Great Depression, following the stock market collapse of 1929, was felt hard here.

Statewide unemployment reached 33%, 25% in Seattle. The unemployed built tent villages called Hoovervilles all around the city. City budgets were cut and social unrest increased, resulting in the violent dockworker’s strike of the early ’30s, to which the Seattle Police Department brought machine guns and gas, its first use here.

Seattle had seen economic crises caused by banks and policies far from the Northwest before — such as the banking crisis of 1893, which set the city back for a time before the Klondike boom. But Seattle and the nation needed help from the federal government to get through the Great Depression. And a focus of that work was on giving people jobs building roads, bridges and parks.

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Seattle has faced calamity before and come out stronger - Crosscut
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