Requiem for Any City Part II
Tacoma has been home for me for almost 3 years, and I've much to learn...
The woods I walk in and the tree capped skyline that is in view from all windows in my home belie a truth I’ve just come to acknowledge after living in the Pacific Northwest for just shy of 3 years: I live closer to an urban center than I’ve ever lived in my life. As a young boy, the closest I got was living in Westerville, Ohio, some 14 miles from Columbus. Here, I’m 10 miles from the center of Tacoma, Washington, the third largest city in this state.
It is, as the man said, a difference of degree I suppose, and it is also true that this unique place, Puget Sound, is a model of urban centers built in the midst of truly vast wilderness. On any given day, just down the road from Tacoma, and sometimes in the city’s limits, can be found bald eagles, coyotes, deer, bears, and just off the boardwalk in the bay, orcas, dolphins, and other sea mammals.
But it is the wildlife in the city that I’m writing about here. On a recent Friday evening, a quick stroll to an over—priced and over-sold wine and tapas bar brought into sharp relief the dying and the insouciant, and a city at once growing toward a brighter future, and slouching toward Bethlehem.
Like Seattle and Portland, its somewhat bigger and more popular nearby sister cities, Tacoma thinks of itself as hip, even as the evidence points to all three of these cities maintaining a visage of urban sophistication and cool on the surface, while the predators lording over decay and rot swim beneath. Good photographers, SEO copy writers and a fairly aggressive P.R. approach to this fortunately placed Puget Sound metropolis allow a public presence that is near Gatsby-esque in its aspirations and dreams long dead, revived in the minds of its patrons. Once referred to as the City of Destiny, on account of its being the terminus of the Northern Pacific railroad in the 19th Century, its new nickname “Grit City,” has a slightly more defining ring to it.
In the heart of downtown, the University of Washington occupies several 19th and early 20th century buildings, cleaned up and marshaled to service for the state’s leading university and its largest satellite campus. The streets through and near it are lined with shops, coffee houses and cool eateries, including a James Beard Award nominee, whose restaurant is a study in how to do hip, cool and seriously great farm-to-table food. The Washington State History Museum sits next to the landmark Union Pacific train depot, now functioning as a Federal Courthouse.
Away from the university and museum, “Pac Av,” or Pacific Avenue is a diverse neighborhood where the buildings have been repurposed, while so called “ghost signs” announce the previous residents whose time has come and gone. Faded lettering beckons from the old brick buildings—“Harmon Furniture Manufacturing,” “Kachlein Exclusive Optician,” and “Slumberite,” a mattress company, and they still cling to their old homes. The Harmon building, for example, now houses part of the University of Washington, Tacoma. This sense of a forgotten past, like Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes watching over the “Valley of Ashes,” creates a mythological past that thrives even as the businesses, some of them no longer even useful or needed industries, fade away.
And on the streets below? A mixture. Tacoma is not a business hub, per se. As a freight railroad head terminus, and with a large and working port, most of the collars here are blue, though there are some exceptions. Gone are the early 20th century days where bustling crowds walked from their offices to grab lunch, or run errands. There are very few times when you’ll see any more than the occasional pedestrian in the city. Even the condo and apartment buildings don’t seem to host crowds of people. If you’re walking, you may be lucky enough to have the street to yourself, but if not, you’re likely spending at least part of your sojourn looking over your shoulder in the heart of downtown.
Go northwest within Tacoma, to Point Ruston and Point Defiance, and up through the Proctor district, and the homes are well kept, neat and even large with sprawling lawns and million dollar price tags and million dollar views of the port and Commencement Bay on Puget Sound. Here, thriving restaurants, shops and businesses make the case for a new definition of “Grit City,” with their determination to keep the tree lined sidewalks clean and their way of life thriving. It’s one of our favorite places to go in the city, and with obvious reason. There is no need to look over your shoulder here.
A private college, the University of Puget Sound, with its ivy lined brick buildings, punctuated by small cottages and quaint houses sit in a kind of center that separates the southeast part of the city from the northwest part.
Southeast of the university, a growing homeless population means that phantoms occasionally wander through the streets, ferocious ghosts high on fentanyl, meth, or whatever is handy, and the pervasive skunk smell of marijuana often scents the air. In abandoned lots, tent communities have grown where the addicted exercise squatting rights, bringing the detritus of their lives with them. The uncertainty of what may happen when crossing paths with these people has been documented, and a violent outcome is not some distant or remote possibility.
The juxtaposition of a wine and tapas bar in a neighborhood that becomes at least sketchy when the sun goes down, and where you had to watch your step from a vomit splash against the curb where you parked is a perfect symbol of downtown Tacoma in some ways. There are places where you you’ll spend $50 per person just for a drink and some appetizers in this blue collar town, while you watch out the window as people wrapped in blankets, ghosts against the cold, walk by.
This is not a simple binary description, however. It would be easy to say, and too often is said, that “the city must make a choice.” In a larger sense, that may be true, but to be definitive, cities and their residents don’t usually make choices. They’re too busy living their lives, raising their families and doing their jobs. Cities have hovered between hope and hopelessness for years, by degrees growing in one or the other direction depending on the thrum and beat of the time.
The complexity of a place like Tacoma, like so many cities now, is less about making a choice, and more about searching our souls. The aforementioned insouciance as the phantom addicts plant their tent stakes into city property is completely understandable from the point of view of pedestrians just going about their business and avoiding entanglement with people who, by and large, are not in their right mind when high. But it solves no problems to have the city’s elected officials ignore the addictions and claim that it’s simply a matter of too little affordable housing. The latter may be somewhat true, but it doesn’t justify the number of tents, the smell of pot, and the amount of drug paraphernalia found in each one, degrading more and more people each day.
And so, like Fitzgerald’s boats against the current, we row into an uncertain night while lauding and swooning over the ghost of a past that is just out of our reach, and a future we haven’t yet considered.
The only real solution is letting them get cold and go hungry. Any enabling will only encourage more aimlessless.... If you want food and heat...do x, y, and z. There is no substitution for self-reliance.