When the last packing crates get hauled out of 1120 Pacific Ave. next week, it will end the longest, continuous run of any business in downtown Tacoma – 125 years.

Commonwealth Title Insurance & Trust Co. opened downtown in 1883. That’s the same year the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its transcontinental line to Tacoma with a golden spike-driving ceremony at Gold Creek, Mont., featuring a mighty sledgehammer swing from former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.

The subsequent population and building boom put Tacoma on the map.

Commonwealth grew with its hometown into the behemoth repository of historic land ownership records and underwriter of property title insurance in Pierce County for decades.

“A History of the Puget Sound,” published in 1903, describes Commonwealth as “the best equipped title plant in the northwest.”

The company merged with other title companies and moved around downtown several times, usually to get more space for its precious volumes of handwritten tract and fee books documenting property transactions and ownerships from Longbranch to Electron.

The Fogg family sold Commonwealth in 1979 to Ticor Title Co., which opened suburban branch offices but always kept a downtown presence. Until now.

Blame it on computerization, the gradual disappearance of other downtown residential real estate businesses and the current precipitous collapse of the housing market.

“It’s kind of sad in a way,” said Joe Zelazny, senior vice president for Fidelity National Title Group, the owners of the Ticor franchise.

Zelazny should know. Fresh out of Pacific Lutheran University, he started in the title business as a bookkeeper downtown in 1969. He joined the Commonwealth-Ticor family when it acquired his company in 1988.

The business has changed. At one time, Commonwealth employed more than 70 people, most in downtown Tacoma to handle the tedious manual job of recording, copying, photographing and organizing the daily plethora of land-related documents filed in Pierce County.

Now? Fidelity has appointed Zelazny to oversee the consolidation of the company’s recording and documentation services for Pierce, King and Snohomish counties to a central office in Renton. The company gets the records from each county by computer and sorts and files them by computer.

“We kept 10,000 square feet downtown (Tacoma), even though we didn’t need it, because we kept all the old tract books. Title guys are pack rats,” Zelazny said. “Now you can fit all that information on one CD.”

Besides that, Zelazny said, for decades when people bought land or homes, they would drive downtown to Commonwealth’s office to sign their closing papers. It made sense. Real estate companies maintained downtown headquarters. The banks in the county seat ran their home mortgage operations solely out of downtown. Closing a deal on a new home marked a momentous event for a family.

“The real estate agents don’t want to drag their customers downtown anymore,” Zelazny said.

Downtown no longer has exclusive rights on the real estate industry. Homeowners prefer to sign the closing papers on their new homes closer to where they live – like at one of Ticor’s offices in Gig Harbor, Puyallup or University Place, where I talked with Zelazny.

With the bottom falling completely out of the residential real estate market, Ticor has had employment cutbacks like the rest of the industry. It closed offices in Bonney Lake, Lakewood and South Hill.

The downturn forced the company’s hand on its downtown office.

“It’s probably something we should have done five or six years ago,” Zelazny said. “But the real estate industry was so hot, everyone was making money. We didn’t have time to think about it.”

Ticor sold its building in 1999 to the Master Builders of Pierce County for $750,000 but continued to lease its space. Now, Ticor has donated all the historic tract books to a commercial repository.

The downtown office has only to crate up some furniture and computers and the historic photographs that hang on the lobby wall.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com