Does historic church with blue-tiled dome have the best views in Tacoma?
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- First Presbyterian Church tower reaches 165 feet and has a blue-tiled octagonal dome.
- Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, the church dates to the early 1920s.
- In its 101 years this building has seen a lot of Tacoma history.
A tall, turquoise dome above an elaborate brick tower has stood resolute in Tacoma’s Stadium District for more than 100 years. Does it offer the best panoramic views in Tacoma?
Up four near-vertical flights of stairs beyond First Presbyterian Church pastor Eric Jacobsen’s office it’s possible to peek out at Commencement Bay through eight Romanesque arches, but only if you know the right people.
During an exclusive tour Tuesday, Jacobsen said the view is second only to that of the next-door retirement community’s rooftop deck. From the tower you can see Puget Sound stretch blue across the horizon, cut by apartment buildings, the business district, houses and pointed towers of Stadium High School.
For more than a century, congregants have worshiped in this historic landmark. It was designed by famous Boston church architect Ralph Adams Cram with rich Christian symbolism expressed in stone, wood, glass and mosaic.
A walk through the sanctuary Tuesday revealed intricate and colorful stained-glass windows, tall vaulted wooden ceilings and elaborate antique iron chandeliers. Jacobsen said spools of chains are attached to the chandeliers, which helped workers change the lightbulbs back in the day — now the bulbs are LED and changed with a lift.
The church’s organ is made up of 4,000 speaking pipes, in addition to a harp of 61 notes, chimes of 25 tubes and more than 35 miles of electric wiring, according to historical records.
A piece of Tacoma history
In its 101 years the building has seen a lot of Tacoma history. In 1922 during World War II, congregants served coffee and donuts to troops-in-transit at Tacoma bus and railroad stations and read to wounded boys at Madigan Hospital at Fort Lewis. The church was there amid the stock market crash and Great Depression, when the ASARCO copper smelter plant came down in 1986 and the COVID-19 pandemic.
When construction began in 1923, Tacoma was a wealthy community, and the congregation, made up of city officials and the mayor, spared no expense, Jacobsen said. Historic records and newspaper clippings kept by the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room show the Weyerhaeuser family was among the industrialists who invested heavily in the church, which was considered the most distinctive in the Pacific Northwest at the time. In 1924, 500 congregants watched the laying of the cornerstone, inside which was placed the Holy Bible, copies of the Saturday issues of the Tacoma News Tribune, the groundbreaking service bulletin and the constitution of the Presbyterian church in the U.S., among other items.
This building is the fourth used by the congregation, which expanded in size to 2,124 parishioners in 1925. At the time, it cost $500,000 to build (which today would be about $9.4 million). Cram designed everything from the building to the furnishings, the light fixtures, the pulpit and a smaller chapel — an exact replica of the one on his estate. The architect was known for designing other monumental churches, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
The First Presbyterian Church tower itself reaches 165 feet into the sky and served as a landmark for ships entering Tacoma’s harbor before the days of radar and sonar. Alternating red and blue symbols surround the blue tiled octagonal dome, which houses a two-octave set of five chimes that today are played with a keyboard downstairs in the organ loft, Jacobsen said. Atop the tower is a weather vane, which was mounted on a movable golden ball so it can give to the wind and right itself automatically.
The eight symbols on the dome include: a square (which stands for the Eternity of Life), a triangle (for the Eternity of the Trinity), the Greek Cross, a five-pointed star (known as the Star of Beauty, a symbol of Health), interlaced circles (an emblem of the Trinity found on the Celtic Cross), a seven-pointed star (representing the sevens of the Bible), a six-pointed star (standing for the Creator), and the monogram I (Iota, for Jesus) and X (Chi, for Christ) overlaid and surrounded by the circle of eternity, or Perfection, according to the church’s website.
Below the dome are niches with statues of the four evangelists — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which were sculpted by local Tacoma artisans and face the four major points of the compass (symbolically, the four corners of the earth), according to the church. Above the front door on the street level are two peacocks (a symbol of plenty and of immortality and resurrection) eating grapes (symbolizing here the holy communion and blood of Christ).
Three memorial rose windows with spokes cutting through stained-glass decorate the facade of the building. The windows are made up of 2,500 separate pieces of glass designed to kaleidoscope rainbow sunlight into the church, according to “The Message of the Symbols,” a book honoring the 100th anniversary of the church’s founding that Jacobsen gave to The News Tribune.
A 10-foot-diameter clock on the face of the church permanently reads 8 o’clock (the church is trying to make repairs and find the needed parts in Switzerland, Jacobsen said).
In the church basement and boiler room, Jacobsen showed The News Tribune the small bed and living area where someone used to stay when tending the boiler in the early 20th century, to ensure it wouldn’t explode.
