Today is the debut of the Gig Harbor Now and Then Historical Location of Mystery series. I would prefer to call the first one Location of Mystery #1, but the AP Style Guide frowns on using the pound symbol in that way. So instead, it will be known as Location of Mystery No. 1.
It is a well-known spot to most people on the Peninsula, but today looks not just vastly, but entirely different than it did in the photo below. That’s what makes it so mysterious.
I don’t know the specific year of the photo, but is in the range of the late 1970s to mid-1983.
To take a current photo for a now and then comparison (which will appear in the next Gig Harbor Now and Then column), I needed to enlist help. I would not have been able to find the spot where the photographer (Claude Spadoni) stood when he took the picture. I might not have been able to get within a couple hundred feet. So I asked Stan Macumber, the owner of Gig Harbor Auto Body, to show me where to stand to take the new picture, which he did…