"Skid Road" Isn't a Seattle Native

We couldn't help but notice that maitre d' Mikel Kanter from Vancouver's Elixir bistro is telling tourists an awfully familiar story:

He also offered that the term "Skid Row" was coined just outside the window for the logging skids that led to the water in earlier times. Skid Row, of course, became a term for the down and out, and there's nothing down and out about Vancouver these days.

Wait a minute. Skid Row? Doesn't he mean "Skid Road"? More importantly, doesn't he mean it was coined just down the coast in Seattle? There's a whole book about it, as we recall.

Let's double-check. Using our trusty library card and the SPL's website, we'll consult the Oxford English Dictionary. Here we go: the earliest citation is from 1880.

The good news: that 1880 reference isn't from Vancouver. The bad news: it's not from Seattle, either. It's from the Adirondacks: "Advised that lumbermen had cut ‘*skid-roads’ on which logs were drawn [etc.]."

The Adirondacks? "Skid Road," the phrase that spawned "skid row," the linguistic claim to fame that appears in local B&B promotional materials, is actually a New York transplant?

We decided to double-double-check, consulting the free-even-to-people-without-a-library-card HistoryLink. Their Yesler's Mill essay repeats the familiar "Skid Road was coined here" story.

But their Henry Yesler article has a more thorough discussion of the issue, in a section called "Skid Road: Fact or Myth?":

Conventional histories have long maintained that logs were sent sliding down this steep "Mill Street" (now Yesler Way), earning it the nickname "Skid Road." Based on more recent research by HistoryLink staff historian Greg Lange, this seems unlikely. Yesler's mill was actually oriented to take in raw logs from Elliott Bay, not from the land, and Mill Street itself was steeply canted north to south and interrupted by a deep ravine near present day 4th Avenue making east-west transport of logs very difficult.

Torn between two articles, we cut to the chase and emailed HistoryLink directly. We received a quick response from Walt Crowley (bolding ours):

The phrase has existed for some time as a general term for a logging camp or track in the woods. We can't find evidence of local usage prior to the early 1900s, when the Rev. Mark Matthews, a leading Prohibitionist, popularized the term to describe the "vice district" south of Yesler Way.

Time to face facts: The Underground Tour lied to us. Or at least, they indulged in a healthy dose of print-the-legendism.

But what about us? We'll always have metronatural.

Yeah, we already knew this. But we were finally inspired to write a full-blown post about it.