Dating to 1850, Tideflats have had many ups and downs

History shows that Tacoma’s Tideflats have seen a cycle of booms and busts since settlers recognized the area’s commercial potential 160 years ago.

The causes and cures of the steep business undulations are most usually the result of business conditions in the larger world. The recovery was often aided by new business tactics and even innovations that originated locally.

Here’s a quick trip through those ups and downs:

1850-1889: From the time Swedish immigrant Nicolas Delin founded Tacoma’s first sawmill near the present-day junction of Dock Street and Puyallup Avenue, pioneers capitalized on Pierce County’s and Tideflats’ natural resources. All along the waterfront from there to Point Defiance, entrepreneurs built docks and sawmills. Tacoma prospered supplying lumber to California and overseas markets. Coal from the mines near Wilkeson became a big export from those deep-water docks, attracting the Northern Pacific Railroad to make Tacoma its West Coast destination. In 1885, Tacoma became the center of the tea trade with Japan, touting its lower cost and higher productivity than other West Coast ports.

1890-1910: Two consecutive economic downturns hit Tacoma in the 1890s and then again in 1907. Banks collapsed. The area’s dominant business player, the Northern Pacific, went bankrupt and moved its headquarters to Seattle.

But lumber proved the savior of the local economy with 22 sawmills working around the clock as the economy improved.

1911-1929: In 1911, prompted by dissatisfaction with railroad control of much of the tidelands, the Legislature passed enabling legislation to allow counties to establish port districts with voter approval. The county hired a consultant to draft a development plan for Commencement Bay. That plan, the Bogue Plan, would later provide a framework for Tideflats development. Voters, however, turned down the port creation in 1912. While urban voters generally favored the plan, rural voters saw no benefit to them and helped defeat it. World War I brought a surge in Tideflats business with tonnage more than doubling in three years. In 1918, the county redrafted the port question, promising rural farmers that the port would build a cold-storage warehouse for their produce and fruit. The measure passed. In the 1920s, the port moved to attract new businesses, including a copper smelter in Ruston that became the city’s largest employer and a grain terminal to handle exports from Eastern Washington.

1930-1940: The Depression hit the Tideflats hard. Tonnage fell steeply. The port itself cut wages three times. Longshore union strikes hit the West Coast including Tacoma but after an 85-day strike waterfront workers won substantial concessions from an arbitration board convened to end the labor dispute.

1941-1945: The Second World War reversed the declines in Tideflats business and rapidly accelerated commerce supplying fighting men on two fronts. A major shipyard on the peninsula between what is now the Blair Waterway and the Hylebos Waterway built 74 ships, including small aircraft carriers, during the war.

1946-1949: The war’s end brought major negative changes to the Tideflats. The Todd-Pacific Shipyard, with its 30,000 wartime workers, shut down. Exports dropped by 90 percent. Other wartime industries such as the War Department’s aluminum smelter, built to supply The Boeing Co. with raw material for warplanes, closed.

1950-1975: The port commission began an aggressive industrial recruitment effort. Kaiser Aluminum bought and reopened the Tideflats smelter. Other industries, chemical plants and other water-dependent businesses, attracted by low hydro power rates from City Light and the Bonneville Power Administration, opened shop on the Tideflats. The port itself dredged a new waterway, the Industrial Waterway, from Commencement Bay nearly to Fife. That waterway, now the Blair Waterway, has been the centerpiece of the port’s shipping development ever since. That development was guided by another strategic plan, authored in 1955 by the Tibbetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton engineering firm. The TAMS plan served as the blueprint for port expansion for decades.

1975-2006: This was the container era. Even as some of the sawmills, plywood and wood products plants, packing houses and older, dirtier industry shut down, the port replaced them with container terminals and a rail yard. First came Totem Ocean Trailer Express, which moved to Tacoma from Seattle in 1976. That shipping line was attracted by the availability of land and longshore worker productivity that made loading trailers aboard its ships supplying Alaska a quicker and more economical proposition.

The consummation of the Puyallup Tribal Land Settlement in the late ’80s removed a legal cloud over the title to some of the most valuable land in the Tideflats and gave the tribe a stake in the future development of waterfront land on the Blair Waterway.

A port innovation, an on-dock rail yard, enticed Sea-Land Service, the first of the big containership companies to call on Tacoma, to move from Seattle in 1985. Sea-Land was followed by Maersk Line, K-Line, Hyundai Merchant Marine, Evergreen Line and others. Container volumes rose quickly, and the port became the sixth-largest container port in the country.

2007-present: This era began on a high note with Japan’s NYK Line signing a deal with the port for a vast new container terminal on the Tideflats. The line was to move here in 2012. But container volumes began eroding, and by 2009, the volumes had dropped by about 25 percent. The port laid off workers, froze salaries and dismissed its executive director.

Under a new chief executive, John Wolfe, the port stabilized its finances and learned to live with less. Now the port is in the midst of a strategic planning effort that the port hopes will, like the Bogue and TAMS plans before it, guide it and the Tideflats back to prosperity.

Source: Historian Ron Magden