Old post office: A Tacoma landmark’s next act
KATHLEEN COOPER; Staff writer
Public hearings in 1920 against Japanese people that whipped up anti-immigrant sentiment and set the stage for a federal law that tied race to immigration rates for decades.
Riots.
Kidnapping investigations.
A seminal legal decision in 1974 that re-established Puget Sound-area tribes’ right to catch half of the salmon in the state’s waters.
Tacoma’s historic post office building at 1102 A St. has been the site of legal drama and import since it opened in 1910 as a multi-purpose federal building. A hundred years later, it’s in the hands of a private owner who is setting the stage for its future.
Centralia-based developer George Heidgerken and his partner, Federal Way businessman Patrick Rhodes, bought the building last month. Heidgerken said they plan to fill it with tenants. If they succeed, it will be the first time since the early 1990s that the four-story building holds more than the U.S. Postal Service’s operations.
“I think everyone knows more about this building than I do,” Heidgerken said. “You can do a lot of things with old buildings but you gotta think it through.”
Last week, Heidgerken took two News Tribune journalists and historic preservation consultant Michael Sullivan on a tour of the building. Sullivan congratulated Heidgerken after they met in the lobby.
“You’ve got a great building here,” Sullivan said. Later, as they walked through the floors, Sullivan and Heidgerken discussed the building’s history and possible future uses, while acknowledging some challenges.
“Do the elevators still work?” Sullivan asked as the group rounded the corner on the second floor lobby.
“Yes they do,” Heidgerken said confidently, then adding with a laugh: “At least, that’s what I’m told. I’m not about to go in there.”
The Tacoma post office building is the length of a city block. It’s set back from the street in a way most downtown buildings aren’t. It’s built of brick, concrete and steel with a limestone exterior – so solid it was a designated fallout shelter during the Cold War. The basement and first floor are home to part of the post office’s operations. The second, third and fourth floors haven’t been occupied in almost 20 years.
U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan started his federal judgeship there. He tried to convince the state courts and others to move in after the federal court operations shifted to the renovated Union Station in 1992.
“We just left that building and it was just, in my view, a tragedy to just walk away from it,” he said last week. “It’s been sitting there waiting for somebody to come along and love it.”
At some time in its 100-year history, the former federal building has been home to the circuit, district and bankruptcy courts; customs; the IRS; the forestry service; the U.S. Marshals; the FBI and of course, the post office.
Some of the building’s noteworthy features:
• Six walk-in vaults (the building originally had 10).
• Prisoner holding cells, complete with black-barred doors.
• Three courtrooms with jury boxes and judges’ benches, attached to offices that used to be the judges’ chambers.
That is catnip for history buffs and Tacoma-philes, but how will it fare when trying to lease space to an office user? Can you keep the black-barred doors and still lease to, say, a tech startup?
Heidgerken considers the question while standing inside the old holding cells, then answers as he walks out the door.
“You’re trying to preserve history – something that can take some time, depending on the user.”
Potential tenants have some negotiating power, too, in an office market with relatively high Class B office vacancy rates. Heidgerken states repeatedly his desire to rehabilitate the historic features of the building, but he’s realistic.
If a tenant will pay $1.25 a square foot “for pink carpet, you put pink carpet here.”
Heidgerken has said he plans to offer rents at $18 to $20 per square foot, which is in line with comparable downtown office space.
Sullivan said the building’s original design on the upper floors was for mostly offices, so it makes sense to try to lease it that way now. “Money spent to reconfigure (the space) would be money wasted,” he said during the tour.
And it’s hard to put a price on a feeling. Judge Bryan said he loved working there.
“I thought just the solid look of that building – it looked like an important government operation,” he said. “The rooms inside were very large, bigger than we had to have. The courtrooms were just great places to work.”
NEEDS A SPIT SHINE
Giving the building a good cleaning is at the top of Heidgerken’s to-do list. The first floor is spic and span, but upstairs is filthy.
Dust and grime coat most surfaces, starting with the marble steps leading upstairs. Thin dirty carpet, bunching up here and there, runs the length of the building’s hallways over the original terrazzo floors.
“A judge couldn’t stand the noise of high heels and made them install the carpet. That’s what I heard, anyway,” Heid-gerken said.
He also plans to upgrade the lighting and put in double-pane windows. And he’s open to ideas for the outside lawns, which he said could be great courtyards with public art.
On the ground floor, the rooms that have the most potential for retail tenants are on the 11th Street side, both accessible from the public lobby. The post office’s former money order room is on the building’s northeast corner and has been used for post office storage.
The bigger and more tantalizing space is on the northwest corner, in the post office’s former registered-mail operations room. The L-shaped room is full of natural light and has gleaming hardwood floors. It attaches to the post office work room, the largest room on the first floor.
Heidgerken and Sullivan agreed that the building will need more ground-floor exits, if it’s going to be full of people.
Most people use the A Street entrance, walking through double doors into a round wooden vestibule that once held revolving doors. The building originally had three such vestibules – one on each side of the current one. Heidgerken said he planned to restore those entrances, as well as consider adding others on the 12th Street side. That was the building’s main entrance when it opened, but it closed in the 1930s in favor of a new driveway and loading platform for mail operations.
LANDMARK INCENTIVES
Adding exits and possibly even changing the windows means the involvement of Tacoma’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is an 11-member volunteer body that reviews changes to the city’s historic buildings.
The 72,000-square-foot post office building is listed on the city, state and national registers of historic places. Such listings are intended to encourage historic preservation and provide guidance on financial incentives for building owners. The state and national listings don’t require anything of a building owner unless he or she is seeking tax credits. But the city listing does bring some requirements.
“If your property is on the Tacoma register, then you are required by ordinance to seek approval from the landmark commission for changes to the outside of the building, but not the inside,” said city preservation officer Reuben McKnight.
McKnight said he hasn’t met with the post office building’s owners yet, and that his office stands ready to help with incentive programs such as the federal tax credit. Heidgerken said he plans to meet with historic preservation officials soon but that the tax credits aren’t on his agenda.
“Sometimes things are tied to those that you don’t want to do,” he said.
Jeff Stroud, a partner at Mountain Construction, said the only guarantee in rehabilitating a historic structure is that there will be surprises. His firm worked on the renovation of the Perkins building, across A Street from the post office building.
“You don’t know what they are. You never know what’s going to happen when you open up walls,” he said.
Heidgerken is undeterred, saying he has the capability to finance whatever work is needed to secure good tenants.
“Buildings can be really cold, and we don’t want that,” he said. “We want something that’s neat to look at and that people can be somewhat proud of.”
Kathleen Cooper: 253-597-8546
kathleen.cooper@thenewstribune.com
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE DOWNTOWN POST OFFICE?
The current post office will remain in its space at 1102 A St. for at least five years.
Postal Service spokesman Ernie Swanson said Wednesday that the agency’s long-term goal is to find a place in the Fife area for the carriers who work out of downtown, because that would put them closer to the routes they serve.
There are no plans to move the retail operation, Swanson said, so people can still buy stamps and receive mail downtown.
As for the post office history museum that used to be on the first floor but was closed to the public in 2004, Swanson said most of the pieces went to the postal museum in Washington, D.C.
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS AT THE POST OFFICE BUILDING
August 1920, Congressional hearings
U.S. Rep. Albert Johnson, who represented Tacoma, was chairman of the House Committee on Immigration. He was staunchly anti-immigrant and an advocate of eugenics. He held hearings at Tacoma’s federal building that ultimately led to the writing and passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which limited the number of immigrants from any country to 2 percent of their numbers already in the United States in 1890. Tacoma historian Michael Sullivan said the legislation particularly targeted Japanese people, many of whom were subpoenaed to testify in Tacoma. They were asked “lots of veiled questions that suggested that people were bleeding off wealth and sending it to a foreign land.”
June 1935 and December 1936, kidnappings
Federal agents investigated the kidnappings of 9-year-old George Weyerhaeuser and 10-year-old Charles Mattson from the federal building.
June 1935, labor riots
In front of the federal building, riots erupted between union and nonunion lumber workers. Tacoma’s police chief ordered the area around the building be cleared, and it was protected by the National Guard.
December 1970, anti-war protests
The Seattle 7 conspiracy defendants were tried at Tacoma’s federal building. The seven people were members of a radical anti-Vietnam War movement and had been charged with conspiring to incite a riot in Seattle. Large groups protested in support of the seven outside the federal building.
February 1974, the Boldt Decision on tribal fishing rights
Judge George Boldt ruled that 120-year-old treaties with five Washington Indian tribes gave them the right to catch half of the salmon in native and nonnative waters every year in exchange for the land they gave up. The decision, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1979, turned the fishing industry on its head.
Source: News Tribune archives,
historylink.org READER COMMENTS
Through the
Biz Buzz blog and
Facebook, we asked readers what they would like to see in the downtown post office building. Some of the responses:
aaronwins: Celebrate the architecture and history with a destination restaurant – something Tacoma can call its own (no chains please) maybe Tacoma’s version of The Met.
shaun9778: How about a public marketplace in the same tradition as Pike Place or Faneuil Hall in Boston?
Morf Morford: I love that old building. I just hope the new owners treat it with respect....
Kevin Manley: What Morf said.
Leslie Young: What Kevin and Morf said.
Bonnie Ashley: What Morf, Kevin, and Leslie said :)
