Tacoma's Old City Hall
OLD CITY HALL Tacoma’s Old City Hall will be 120 years old soon. But when I was born, here in Tacoma, it was only 60. The accelerating pace of time and change in my life takes my breath away. To me, preserving solid links between past, present, and future is not just a civic-minded option, but vital for our human needs for connection, for community, and for continuity spanning the flow of time. How much easier it is to convey a sense of the living history of our forbears and founders, not in the construction of new memorials and commemorative plaques, but in the surviving monuments to their lives of industry and optimism embodied by buildings like Old City Hall. How much better it is to read the writings on the walls of history when the walls still stand. We leave a matchless inheritance when we are conscientious, comprehensive stewards of our ancestral legacy both in nature and in the artifacts of our civilization. They say that the chisel marks of a stonecutter are as distinctive as a signature or thumbprint. One can openly see the different chiseled strokes on the huge rough-hewn stone pillars of the foundation of Old City Hall. Stand for awhile among the stones and it is like a conversation between the ringing hammers as individual laborers build the foundation for a great city, “a shining city on a hill”, a City of Destiny. Old City Hall is a hands-on testimonial to the creative skills of past artisans: architects, stonecutters and foundry workers; masons, machinists and woodworkers. It sings praises to pioneer entrepreneurial visionaries and urban designers, planners and developers and to the business people and civil servants that finance and maintain our city unto our own day. Though we sometimes think we invented it, it was a global economy even then. People the world over did the manual labor of America’s blooming, both in America and abroad. The makers of the bells at the top of the clock tower and the furnace room doors in the basement of Old City Hall aren’t identified by mere nameplates and decals. Manufacturers proudly, indelibly molded their names into the very fabric of their productions - fiery bronze and cast iron - the stuff from which the memorial bells and furnace doors are made, to be seen and admired for generations to come. I suspect that our present mass consumer economy of disposable goods, planned obsolescence, and change for the sake of change would have mystified the people who envisioned and built Old City Hall. Imbedded in their idea of what Tacoma could be, personified by the architect E. A. Hatherton, is a pinnacle of Western Civilization. In his design he evokes the Florentine Renaissance of global finance and high culture, proclaiming this is our heritage, ideal, and the starting point from which we Tacoman’s will move forward into a better, brighter future. I can claim these things, confident that they are true, only because this magnificent building still stands. I can see the truth with my own eyes and touch the truth with my own hands. I can actually enter the truth through the front door. But what if it were gone, another lost relic of bygone days seen only in old sepia photos. Then you would have to take my claims largely on faith surrounded by uncertainty, details erased forever by time. But as long as the walls of Old City Hall stand, as long as it remains occupied by the aspirations and practical pursuits of the living, then our case for preservation is made, our position proved by outstanding evidence. I am an artist and I believe with admiration and a touch of envy that architecture at it’s best is the greatest art; the sculpture of human enclosure, occupying space with beauty while accommodating the human need for shelter. In a vibrant, forward-looking culture we can anticipate new classics of art and architecture to emerge and inspire us from time to time. But with the loss and potential loss of structures like the Luzon Building and Old City Hall, we will never again live among works of such pioneering beauty: progenitors of our modern skyline adorned with ebullient decoration and idealism. It seems more than fitting that a compass card of bold clock faces marks time on the tower of Old City Hall. They remind us and each succeeding generation of the need to care for and preserve the past even as we preoccupy ourselves with creating our own modern legacies we hope will continue to inhabit the future. If this is our real motivation and true purpose in this life then we must somehow find a way to communicate with our youngest citizens and all the generations yet to be. We wish to say to them, “Please accept and care for our gifts to you even as we have benefited and cared for our inheritance of the past. Preserve the good we have created so that we shall not have lived anonymously or in vain.” This then is our common inheritance past, present, and future; our legacy of the commons personified by lovely open spaces surrounded by stately structures such as Old City Hall.
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