I was standing on world-renowned glassblower Dale Chihuly's Bridge of Glass when it hit me: I had become a tourist in my own hometown.
The span, which shimmers with Chihuly's amazing installations, connects the new Museum of Glass with Union Station, the once abandoned, now gloriously refurbished beaux-arts-style rail terminus built for Northern Pacific in 1910. It's now home to a federal court, the Washington State History Museum and the new Tacoma Art Museum. The complex, along with the bourgeoning University of Washington Tacoma campus, forms the heart of a downtown brought back from the grave.
When I moved away in the mid-1960s, Tacoma was a gritty town surrounded by military bases, scrabbling along on its odiferous pulp mills and poison-spewing smelter -- a song, The Aroma of Tacoma, was a local hit when I was a kid in the 1950s -- while Seattle, 50 kilometres to the north, grew fat on a rich diet of Boeing-built jetliners.
Sure, Tacoma had a spectacular physical setting: San Francisco-style hills rising above Commencement Bay on Puget Sound, one of North America's largest saltwater estuaries, all tucked between the jagged Olympic mountains to the northwest and the Cascade range to the east. On a clear day, Mount Rainier, a 4,392-metre volcano about 100 kilometres to the southeast, looks like it's on the outskirts of town.
But the city core became moribund and soulless in the 1960s when long-established businesses, including timber giant Weyerhauser, migrated to the suburbs.
The renaissance began about 15 years ago when the University of Washington, starved for space in Seattle, moved into Tacoma's run-down but historically significant warehouse district adjacent to Union Station. The university refurbished several buildings, creating a vibrant inner-city campus. A second phase of construction is now under way. The influx of students led to the restoration of more office structures and warehouses as restaurants and loft condominiums. New hotels, a convention centre and the attendant nightclubs and restaurants soon followed.
Things kicked into overdrive in recent years when moneyed Californians, who had already driven real-estate values in Seattle through the roof, discovered Tacoma's affordable prices and a short commute. Now, the city has some significant attractions to offer visitors who have traditionally had their eyes set squarely on Seattle.
At the top of the list is the aforementioned Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art. When city officials approached Chihuly -- a Tacoma native whose massive pieces have drawn crowds to the world's great art galleries -- about a museum dedicated to his work, he demurred, insisting it should house modern art works -- and not just in glass -- from around the globe.
His contribution would be the Bridge of Glass, a pedestrian span that glows with marine colours as sunlight streams through the spectacular works displayed in its walls. He has described it as "the gateway that welcomes people to Tacoma." One of his enormous chandeliers also graces the grand sweep of Union Station's nine-storey dome.
In the museum's Hot Shop Amphitheatre, visitors can watch Chihuly's apprentices create new works, while enthusiastic staffers explain the intricacies of this delicate art form.
The museum, with its signature glass cone that recalls the wood-drying kilns that once dotted the countryside here, sits on the Thea Foss Waterway, a working canal named for the woman who parlayed a single rowboat in 1888 into the Foss Launch and Tug Co., now Foss Marine, the largest tugboat company on the U.S. West Coast. The refurbished waterway sports a boardwalk for sightseers and a bloom of new condominiums.
A short ride away on the new light-rail transit line that runs from the Tacoma Dome arena through downtown is the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts, a complex that includes the magnificently refurbished Pantages Theater, where my mother used to watch vaudeville acts, and Theatre on the Square, an outdoor venue set atop an underground parking garage.
Those who prefer their vacations outdoors won't be disappointed in Tacoma. Point Defiance Park, a 283-hectare jewel that dates back to 1880, is carved from the fir trees that tower above Puget Sound. Its attractions include a zoo and aquarium where, as a kid, I was offered the chance to shake hands with an octopus (I declined). The park's hiking trails provide magnificent views of the Olympic mountains and Puget Sound, while those feeling less athletic can wander through the Japanese Gardens, with their reflecting pools and a pagoda built in 1914.
