Tacoma is famous for one thing: its smell. If Seattle is considered a remote backwater in the 1950s—and it is—then Tacoma, poor sister to the south, is even more remote, more philistine, beneath contempt. Tacoma is Seattle’s industrial flunky, the also-ran, the perennial embarrassment. Its setting once bore the rich grandeur of the Northwest, framed by mountains, royal robes of evergreens trailing into the placid harbor of Commencement Bay. Before white men arrived, it was a natural oasis, but Tacoma’s forefathers took that charm and threw it away with both hands. In 1873, having commissioned a design by Frederick Law Olmsted laying out the town in a series of curvilinear terraces beautified with seven parks, city planners reacted with “a bemused blend of boosterism and dismay.” During a recession, they rejected Olmsted’s vision.
Instead, the town on Commencement Bay, considered one of the five best natural harbors in the world, chooses industry at every turn, buoyed by a brief boom associated with the building out of the Northern Pacific Railway, battening on the smoke and stench of wood pulp and paper mills, lumberyards, oil refineries, chemical plants, rendering plants, sewage tanks, and smelters. What is a smelter? It is a commercial volcano, melting rocks for metal.
It is the Götterdämmerung. If you are one of those people who think rock is a solid, think again: it burns…