Caroline Gallacci

Described as a grand hotel unlike any other in the region, it was a meeting place for both society and business. Then one night in 1935, the Tacoma Hotel went down in flames. Fortunately no one died in the fire, but the event was sad nevertheless because a landmark building was gone overnight.

A new book by Caroline Gallacci and Ron Karabaich illustrates this sort of story many times over. Vanishing Tacoma, like most books in the Images of America series, uses captioned vintage black and show more white photographs to show the steady remaking of a city. Hotels, schools, banks, houses, and roads have come and gone. One generation's structures erase those before them. Only a precious few survive. The buildings that manage to grow old sometimes do so through the efforts of preservationists, but more often their longevity is due to the pure chance of being in a place that city planners, developers, or disasters didn't find and destroy. Time moves on. A city is forever changing.

Vanishing Tacoma shows ghosts in plain view. If you're familiar with Tacoma, you might recognize in the photographs the curve of a hill or a building that still stands. Such clues may reveal places you know well. But stark differences between a century-old photo and your modern reality can play games in your brain. You know the place, but the surroundings have utterly changed. Ghosts. Gone and mostly forgotten. Replaced.

The fourteen images in the first chapter show neighborhood scenes a few decades on either side of 100 years ago. They are perhaps the best examples with which to compare today with that foreign land of the past. Sequences of photos later in the book show specific properties over time, with the comings and goings of icons like the Charles Wright Building in downtown Tacoma and the Boathouse on the waterfront near Point Defiance.

Not all parts of the city are represented in the book, to be sure, and some photographs are not as interesting as readers might wish. The cover photo, for instance, was a curious choice to spotlight. But many other photographs in the book simply reveal a past you may be entirely unfamiliar with: the "wild west" look of an unpaved Pacific Avenue in the 1890s, Sixth Avenue with streetcar tracks, the Crystal Palace Public Market, and the sturdy bicycle bridge spanning the gulch near Holy Rosary Church.

Cities change slowly but steadily. The images in Vanishing Tacoma remind us how the present fades into the past one building, one paved road, and one ghost at a time. Historians and preservationists try to prevent it, but even something of grandeur (and all the people who toiled on it or in it) can fade completely. From our perspective of the Tacoma Hotel many decades after its fire, we see that not only has that grand hotel vanished from the city's skyline; it has been erased from popular memory as well. How many modern Tacomans know that such a grand hotel operated at Ninth & A for more than 50 years? Or that it even existed at all? Will the work of our lives vanish as well?

[I wrote this review originally for WA-List.com] show less