About 50 people gathered Saturday at Ruston School parking lot to bid a final farewell to the Ruston Way tunnel.
They ate hot dogs, sat at picnic tables in the sun and swapped stories about the tunnel and the old Asarco smelter, where many of them had spent careers working.
Afterward, some used Sharpie pens to sign their names on a banner that in a few days will be buried along with the tunnel.
“Ruston Way Tunnel 1912-2011,” the banner said. “99 Years of Memories.”
“It’s something we’ve been planning for a long time,” said Karen Pickett, a Ruston resident who has written a book about the history of the town.
The tunnel is the last remnant of the old Asarco plant, she said, and when it goes, it will be a milestone.
“It’s a sign of remediation being over and redevelopment really truly happening,” Pickett said.
The tunnel, which closed to traffic July 13, connected the town of Ruston with Tacoma’s Ruston Way and for decades went directly through the smelter works.
Signs at the tunnel entrance advised honking on the way through, much to the delight of generations of local children.
Designation of the smelter as a federal Superfund site and a billion-dollar redevelopment spelled the end for the tunnel. The development, called Point Ruston, will cover 97 acres with housing and retail development.
In the process, developers will pack the 300-foot tunnel with dirt and bury it, eventually diverting traffic onto a broad new bypass road.
Saturday’s farewell was low-key, attended mostly by Ruston residents well north of retirement age.
When someone played a recording of the old smelter whistle on a boom box, it drew smiles and nods all around.
Not everybody was impressed, though.
“It didn’t sound anything like the real whistle,” said Thomas “Doc” Dockery, 84. “The real one would lift you right up out of your chair.”
“We lived by that whistle,” said Dockey, who worked at the smelter for 37 years.
Dockery doesn’t have any real objection to replacing the tunnel with a road, he said, but he doesn’t see the necessity of it, either.
“I guess that’s progress,” he said. “I don’t understand it, but that’s the way the world turns.”
Dockery’s wife, Delores, 83, has lived in Ruston her entire life. She remember walking through the tunnel in the early part of the 20th century, something that more recently would qualify as a death-defying act.
“You could walk through the tunnel to the waterfront,” Delores Dockery said, “but that was when there were Model T’s and Model A’s in there. You couldn’t do that nowadays.”
One of the most repeated stories was one about a policeman named Kearney (no one could remember his first name) who had his arm hanging out the window of his patrol car in the tunnel and got it cut off in a collision with another car.
The amputation barely affected Kearney’s policing abilities, residents remembered, and he went on to serve the town admirably for years afterward.
There were the toxic icicles that grew like stalactites from the tunnel roof, so long and thick the town firemen used to have to close the tunnel and go in and break them off so traffic could pass through.
And there was the long history of vehicles that were too tall for the tunnel and got stuck partway through.
Watching the tow trucks come and haul out trucks and buses was a constant source of amusement for workers at the Tacoma Narrows Federal Credit Union, located just past the Ruston-side tunnel entrance, said Pat Loomis, a credit union employee.
Mike Cohen, the principal developer in the Point Ruston project, attended the occasion in a baseball cap, and for a while he cooked hot dogs on a propane grill.
Cohen said he felt no nostalgia or emotional connection to the tunnel.
“It’s an item to be remediated from the contaminated past,” he said.
“Besides,” Cohen said, “It’s not as if anybody is destroying the tunnel.
“It’s still going to be there,” he said. “We’re just filling it up and burying it.”
Cohen said he prefers to look forward rather than back.
“I’m more focused on the excitement I think people will feel when they see the new road unveiled,” he said.
Rob Carson: 253-597-8693
rob.carson@thenewstribune.com
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