{"id":58,"date":"2016-12-07T19:08:48","date_gmt":"2016-12-07T19:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/?page_id=58"},"modified":"2017-01-30T20:21:21","modified_gmt":"2017-01-30T20:21:21","slug":"seattle-1889","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/fire\/seattle-1889\/","title":{"rendered":"Seattle, 1889"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fire that lasted through the afternoon and evening of 6 June 1889 in Seattle destroyed nearly all of the city’s wharfs and more than thirty commercial blocks downtown. With no reported deaths, however, the fire quickly became a cause around which the city\u2019s business leaders could unite to modernize the city. Within two days, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer <\/em>reported repeated applause at a town meeting to Jacob Furth\u2019s proclamation that \u201cwe will look upon yesterday\u2019s fire as an actual benefit to Seattle \u2026 we will have a finer city within eighteen months.\u201d Unlike many other cities faced with the tension between quick construction and planned improvements, Seattle successfully redrew property lines, raised the grade of lots, widened streets, and committed to stone and brick buildings; this latter commitment, however, was more rhetorical than practical as the city was unable to enforce new \u201cfire-resistive\u201d building practices.<\/p>\n

Augustus Koch (b. 1840 was a travelling draftsman of large, lithographed city views. Subtitled \u201cEighteen Months after the Fire,\u201d Koch\u2019s depiction of the city feeds into the rhetoric of businessmen like Jacob Furth who projected the quick revitalization of Seattle after the fire. The red in the map seems to indicate, as did some other contemporaneous city views, the city\u2019s brick buildings. In the downtown region, this red, playing between the red of flames and the red of brick, reinforces the rhetoric of a city strengthened by fire.<\/p>\n

Augustus Koch, \u201cBirds-eye-view of Seattle and environs King County, Wash., 1891\u201d (1891)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"g4284_s4a3_1891_k6\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fire that lasted through the afternoon and evening of 6 June 1889 in Seattle destroyed nearly all of the city’s wharfs and more than thirty commercial blocks downtown. With no reported deaths, however, the fire quickly became a cause … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8103,"featured_media":0,"parent":7,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-58","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/58\/revisions\/173"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wheredisasterstrikes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}