The Goddess of Commerce will rise again.

Above Commerce Street in Tacoma. Facing Broadway. In her left hand she cradles a container ship. In her right, monuments of architecture – Old City Hall, Tacoma Dome, Museum of Glass cone. She wears a puffy-sleeved garment reminiscent of Thea Christiansen Foss, the late-1800s Norwegian matriarch whose rowboat rental service grew into Foss Maritime. Down her back flows a run of salmon. From her ear lobes dangle miniature cargo cranes.

You remember the Goddess, right? Or maybe not. I haven’t written about her in nearly two years.

But in five installments over 15 months beginning in January 2004, you and I went on an exhaustive search for the original Goddess that took us from Tacoma to New York to Browns Point to Long Beach on the Washington coast and back. Why?

Because Paula Rees suggested it. The City of Tacoma hired Rees, a Seattle consultant, to draft strategies that, if pursued, would put some cha-ching and sizzle into downtown Tacoma’s retail life.

Rees outlined mostly tangible, sprucing-up-and-marketing strategies with direct payoffs. Except for one more mystical and symbolic suggestion.

During her research, Rees came across an obscure reference on page 61 of “South on the Sound,” an illustrated history of Tacoma and Pierce County written by the late Murray and Rosa Morgan. The passage described a prolific Tacoma architect, C. August Darmer, a Prussian by birth and temperament, who came to Tacoma in 1884.

“Within a year Darmer was chosen to design a building for the newly organized chamber of commerce,” the Morgans wrote. “The three-story structure at the (southeast) corner of Twelfth and Pacific featured a cast-iron face topped by a heroic statue of the Goddess of Commerce, modeled (rumor had it) on Darmer’s bride, the former Sophie Schultz. The handsome building won Darmer many commissions.”

That building, finished in December 1885, no longer exists. The Goddess disappeared with it. The plaza of the Wells Fargo Building occupies that space today.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” Rees mused during a presentation of her findings, “if you could locate her and she could watch over a new era of business growth in Tacoma?”

We tried to find her.

We found Darmer’s descendants, who live in Browns Point, and scanned the architect’s diary for clues. We read through Darmer’s professional papers at the University of Washington. We scoured files in the Northwest Room at the Tacoma Public Library and learned Edward Miller of the Miller Cornice and Roofing Co. in Tacoma crafted the Goddess. We searched the collection of statuary at the Washington State Historical Society. We consulted with a New York expert in cast iron antiquities. We searched the Smithsonian Institution’s outdoor sculpture database.

We found fuzzy newspaper photographs of the Chamber building with the Goddess on top. And this description:

“… on the top of the pediment stands a female figure, 6 feet 10 inches in height, representing commerce, holding in her right hand a globe, to signify that Tacoma will do business with the whole world; and in her left hand an oar, in allusion to the water traffic of the city. Her right foot rests on an anchor, and by her left side are placed a sheaf of wheat and a basket of fruit, indicative of the productions of the territory.”

And finally? We learned of her demise. Thanks to David McHugh of Fox Island. His father, Walt McHugh, a demolition man, tore down the Chamber building in 1950. David, then a 16-year-old Bellarmine student, met his dad at the demolition site after school.

He remembered the Goddess sitting askew amidst a pile of rubble. The Goddess went to a Tacoma scrap yard, which recycled her.

“I asked (Dad) why he didn’t save it,” David McHugh recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh, it’s just junk.’”

Walt McHugh turned his gains from the Goddess into whiskey for his workers – a payday Friday ritual.

“That was the day (Dad) turned the Goddess into whiskey,” McHugh said. The story could have ended there, if not for Tacoma sculptor Marilyn Mahoney.

She has nearly finished a 7-foot-tall plasticine clay model of a modern Goddess of Commerce – as she envisions her. It stands in the gallery at Bronze Works, a downtown Tacoma foundry. A day will come when the new bronze Goddess will stand atop a 2-foot-tall pedestal in Theater on the Square Park.

Pierce Transit has agreed to give the Goddess a spot in the park, but the City of Tacoma owns the air rights. So Mahoney must win permitting approval from the city and present a perpetual liability insurance and maintenance plan. Or the city could formally accept the piece into its public art collection.

“It’s because of you and your columns that I was inspired to do this,” Mahoney said.

A nice compliment, but Rees, the retail consultant, deserves the credit for her prophecy nearly six years ago that the Goddess once again will “watch over a new era of business growth in Tacoma.”

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com