Without question, one of the most consequential decisions the voters of Tacoma made in the 20th century was the 1980 vote to construct the Tacoma Dome.
Voters had considered the question of building a versatile facility for sports, trade shows and concerts three times: in 1967, 1972 and 1976. They said “no” each time. But just two years after the previous failure, some elected officials and business and community leaders were working towards a fourth proposal to take to the voters.
It goes without saying that the March 1976 opening of the Kingdome in Seattle inspired the activist groups to try again. And the original manager of the Kingdome, Ted Bowsfield, inspired them too. Bowsfield frequently met with business and civic leaders in Tacoma to encourage their efforts and offer suggestions as to what a Tacoma version of a domed stadium should be like.
But it was by no means certain that voters would go along with another pitch for the new arena. A supermajority vote of 60 percent was required for approval.
The 4th vote occurred on March 18, 1980, and was approved by 70 percent of voters. The election allowed the city government to issue bonds in the amount of $28 million to build a versatile indoor arena capable of hosting most sporting events (other than baseball) as well as concerts, trade shows and large community events such as graduations and other celebrations.
What had changed?
Various community-based groups from business, civic, and sports organizations had long sought to improve the city’s facilities capable of holding large events. *1 These groups did not often agree about which type of venue was the city’s highest priority. A stadium? A convention and trade center? A concert hall? They also sometimes strongly disagreed as to where the new facility should be located.
Tacoma voters saw for themselves what the Kingdome had done for Seattle. In the first months after it opened the Seahawks played their first game and Wings, The Eagles, and Aerosmith held concerts there. Lots of people from Tacoma attended these events. A facility large and versatile enough to accommodate the goals of those wanting better sports opportunities but also serving as a large concert venue and home for conventions and trade shows would work here. By 1979 there was a rare sense of optimism in Tacoma about having “a dome of our own.”
Looking back on newspaper clippings from the months before the election, there is very little discussion of just where the new facility would be located.
But the question certainly came up. Curious citizens wanted to know, and two parts of the city quickly became the only real candidates. Three different sites in the downtown area had champions. There were also supporters of building the arena adjacent to Cheney Stadium.
In mid-September of 1979, three months before the City Council would vote to put the dome question to voters, a remarkable meeting was held downtown between the leadership of the Tacoma Athletic Commission (TAC), the Downtown Tacoma Association (DTA), Mayor Mike Parker and some members of the city council, the chamber of commerce, and executives of the Tacoma News Tribune. This group, with no formal name but sometimes referred to as “the grand alliance,” decided to set aside the location question and focus their efforts on securing voter approval. That was a very pragmatic decision and eliminated a potential source of “no” votes. But the group then went beyond just deferring a location decision. They all agreed to support one of the three downtown sites known as the Hawthorne site, then a struggling residential neighborhood downtown adjacent to I-5.
In January of 1980 the city council unanimously agreed to seek voter approval of the new proposal on March 18. The vote count was so positive, it was called on election night. The News Tribune’s headline the next day shouted “Minidome earns unparalleled OK”. *2
Now, where do we build it?
Mayor Parker had campaigned for office on the idea of bringing a World’s Fair to Tacoma. Witnessing how Seattle’s 1962 fair and Spokane’s 1974 expo had reclaimed downtown adjacent properties to new, community focused uses, Parker wanted his fair to be built where the dome now sits, with the Dome to be located along what is now called Foss Waterway. The two sites would be connected via monorail.
A report Parker commissioned torpedoed the waterway site for the arena, so he later proposed both the dome and the fair at the Hawthorne location.
The Tacoma Athletic Commission (TAC) was first among equals in the coalition that came together for the election because of its ability to raise money for the campaign. TAC strongly favored the Cheney Stadium site. The immediate area surrounding Cheney Stadium also housed park district league baseball diamonds, and the new Henry Foss High School. There was plenty of room for the dome and its parking lots. After all, the argument went, with a successful Triple A baseball park already there, the new dome would be the perfect complimentary facility. TAC saw sports as the primary focus of the arena.
The Downtown Tacoma Association (DTA), an organization that served as a retail-oriented chamber of commerce for city center businesses, favored a downtown site that is now the home to the University of Washington Tacoma campus. In 1980, the area of large warehouse buildings was largely empty and in serious decline.
All of the parties to the grand alliance knew the final decision would belong to the City Council following the required Environmental Impact Statement. In order for the alliance to show a united front to voters and focus on turning them out for a March election, TAC let go of its sports complex idea while Mayor Parker still held out hope for the Hawthorne site having enough space for the arena and his world’s fair. The DTA would get a chance to push for a more central downtown site during the EIS process.
Everyone at the meeting came to realize they cared more about getting the dome built somewhere in Tacoma and less about it only being at their favorite location. An unidentified TAC member was quoted as saying of the parties at the meeting “We don’t want to fight. We just want a minidome.”
All of the sites preferred by the various members of the grand alliance were analyzed in the required Environmental Impact Statement in 1980 (except for Mayor Parker’s Foss Waterway site) and the City Council chose the Hawthorne location.
They made the right choice. Building the Tacoma Dome at Cheney Stadium would have diminished its success as an arena and as a community icon:
· The dome is a regional draw for many of its events. The traffic for these events is handled on I-5 and on downtown streets. At Cheney Stadium, it would be funneled on to the smaller SR-16 freeway and arterials that run along residential areas.
· Downtown, the Tacoma Dome can and does hold events on the same night as the Tacoma Rainiers play at Cheney Stadium. That would be problematic if the two facilities were adjacent.
· Tacoma’s downtown has struggled to have a defined skyline. There are iconic buildings such as Old City Hall, Union Station, or the former Puget Sound Bank Building, but they are small, and not visible from the way most people see the city: I-5. The Tacoma Dome fixes that problem.
· Signature buildings should be in city centers.
And, most importantly:
· Voters had a chance to build the dome at Cheney Stadium and said no. The 1976 ballot issue for a $14 million sports-oriented facility to be built next to Cheney Stadium was trashed by voters, achieving only a 46 percent yes vote. (This was a county-wide election. All of the other three were in Tacoma only.)
As to the other sites discussed: The waterway was never considered in the EIS as Mayor Parker’s own study ended that part of his world’s fair proposal. The EIS did consider what was called the “hillside site” downtown. The DTA continued pushing for this location. No one had even conceived of such a thing as a downtown Tacoma campus for the University of Washington in 1980. This site was done in by the cost of excavation and the unknown but very real possibility of discovery of contaminated soils.
Other urbanists can comment on the fate of the Hawthorne neighborhood. While the old elementary school there was sadly demolished, many of the homes in the area were relocated to other sites in Tacoma. The state built I-5 through a large portion of Hawthorne long before the Tacoma Dome was built. What dome construction took out was the struggling remanent of a neighborhood.
*1 Prior to the Tacoma Dome, the largest arena in the city was the University of Puget Sound Memorial Fieldhouse. (The Seattle Sonics played a handful of games there in the earliest years of the franchise.) Lincoln and Stadium High Schools had bowls that held football games and some large outdoor events. The largest theater was the Temple Theater downtown. The largest trade show venue was the Bicentennial Pavilion, a bare bones concrete block structure built by the city in 1976 at 13th & Market downtown. It was sold to the adjacent hotel (that was built years later) several years ago.
*2 The term “minidome” was commonly used to describe the arena proposal to make clear that Tacoma was not planning to build a Kingdome-sized facility.