Transforming Tacoma
Considering bygone years, hidden from view
Last Saturday, I revisited old grounds with a dear college friend. We visited Point Defiance Park in Tacoma’s North End, not even a half-dozen miles from the campus where we met and formed a lasting friendship.
I had not explored the park in decades. The day was spectacular, cold and clear with a brisk wind that made us thankful we wore multiple coats and hats. The Mountain was out. A near-perfect PNW winter day that had me thinking once again about times and places I could no longer touch.
Familiar, and Not
In Point Defiance Park, the grassy space where I recall spending a weekend day studying looked the same. The forested Five Mile Drive seemed more crowded with cars but otherwise just the same (complete with a raccoon sitting on the road’s shoulder). The beaches smelled the same and brought visitors out just like before, although some of the roads to them have closed to cars since I became a college graduate.
It was the type of familiar, yet not identical, experience that I have found increasingly common when I revisit places at my more experienced age.
One part of the skyline adjacent to the park had changed when I was still in college, but the transformation has become even more dramatic in the years since.
An Industrial Past
In 1917, as US troops finally engaged in World War I, the American Smelter and Refining Company (ASARCO) built a smokestack at its facility in Tacoma. The site started with lead smelting and refining in 1890. ASARCO switched over to copper smelting in 1912.
The smokestack was impressive: 2.5 million bricks, 5,000 tons of mortar, 571 feet tall (until damage from an earthquake required a slight lowering to 562 a couple decades later).
While it operated, the smokestack directed arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals across more than 1,000 square miles for many decades. The operation also polluted Commencement Bay and groundwater. The entire facility closed down in 1985. The Environmental Protection Agency had already placed the nearby area on the Superfund National Priorities List two years before, part of the federal program to clean up hazardous wastes left behind from industrial activities as outlined in the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980).
In An Open Pit Visible from the Moon, I wrote about the persistent, creative efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to stop Kennecott Copper Company from developing its property within Glacier Peak Wilderness into an open-pit copper mine. Had the mine opened, at least some of the preliminary plans directed the ore to be smelted at the ASARCO in Tacoma. Learning this during the research for that book connected me to the topic in one more personal way.
Just as my fourth semester of college got underway, the smokestack, once the tallest in the world, came down. The smokestack stood about four or five miles from campus, so none of us saw it on a daily basis. But when we headed out on a bike ride or a drive along the waterfront or a visit to Point Defiance Park, ASARCO’s smokestack stood out as a landmark whose history we rarely pondered.
When it came down, a hole in the skyline appeared.
I was not one of those who watched it live, but I remember when it happened. I remember hearing how the demolition sent arsenic into the air again, one last way for the smokestack to pollute the region. The ASARCO buildings nearby, as I recall it, had mostly been demolished by then. I have some vague recollection of razed buildings, some remnant piles, maybe fences. It was a stretch of road to get through between the nice Old Town waterfront to Point Defiance.
When the stack disappeared, the scene became post-industrial, literally.
A Transformed Present
Today, that landscape is something else entirely. Not an obvious industrial trace remains. Instead, atop that contaminated soil, cleaned up because of federal environmental regulation, upscale retail shops, yoga studios, and more with apartments and condominiums stacking above them. They overlook Commencement Bay with a view of both the Olympic and Cascade Mountains on clear days.
Between this new urban development and the old Point Defiance Park, a new park sits. In honor of a Tacoma native and science fiction start, the Dune Peninsula and the Frank Herbert Trail wrap around a marina and end at the Tacoma Yacht Club.
We walked there, watching the gulls overhead and a small flock of dunlins in their flashy choreographed flight. The beauty of the scene made it hard to remember precisely where we were and its history of contamination.
But I can only forget for so long. Soiled ground has a way of grabbing my historian’s attention. I wondered how many others enjoying the day recognized the century of pollution that emanated from the site. I wondered how many of them complain about government regulations that set basic pollution standards and require cleanup. Who among them would invite slag dumped in their backyard?
Endnotes
New Writing. I’ve been doing some writing about Pacific Northwest forests for HistoryLink.org lately. My latest feature is on the history of forests in the North Cascades. You can read it here.
Love this, Adam! I was in grad school here during that time but left just before the stack came down. When I moved back I was amazed to see the development and thought it was silly but then moved there for a year and changed my tune. I came to LOVE the new park and its homage to native son, Frank Herbert, and that Point Defiance is now connected for peds/cyclists. We are so fortunate to have the open spaces on that end of town. Now that I am renting a house up the hill, though, all veg and herbs will be grown above ground…the arsenic plume was no joke!