The NW Room will make old TNT photos available for the first time. Here’s what you’ll find
The file cabinets in back — all 36 of them — were some of the last things to go.
Tall and black, they’d been there, gathering dust, since the first time I stepped in the old News Tribune building, and in reality quite a bit longer. Next to the ancient microfiche reader and a faded collection of TNT softball trophies from the 1980s, the cabinets — containing a rarely seen collection of old TNT photographs and clippings — were part of the State Street backdrop where Pierce County’s paper of record was produced, day in and day out, for decades.
But by May 2021, that was no longer the case. Nearly all of The News Tribune’s staff had been working remotely for almost a year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the building we’d left was in the process of being sold. While a few of us still wandered in from time to time — donning masks and seeking a respite from the monotony of working from our bedrooms or kitchen tables — we knew the end of an era was near. The building would soon be reduced to rubble to make way for a new 248,000-square-foot warehouse, and everything inside that was worth saving needed a new home.
Thankfully — in the case of the file cabinets, and more importantly the history stored inside them — we had somewhere to turn.
Working with the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room, and lead archivist and historian Anna Trammell, News Tribune Executive Editor Stephanie Pedersen struck a deal that allowed possession of the file cabinets to be transferred to an institution that knew just what to do with them.
Here’s the best part:
Soon, we will all have a chance to see what was inside.
Next week, The Northwest Room will officially unveil an online archive that features digitized versions of more than 1,200 photos that were previously stored in those dusty old file cabinets. In all, according to Trammell, the Northwest Room received roughly 360 standard banker’s boxes worth of material from The News Tribune. The old photos account for approximately half, and many of them were never published in print.
Trammell said some of the oldest TNT photos date back to the early 1900s, but the “bulk of the content” is from the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
According to Trammell, the photos help to fill gaps in the Northwest Room’s archive. Some depict areas of the city — like Hilltop or the old Hawthorne neighborhood that was lost during construction of Interstate 5 and later the Tacoma Dome — that have changed significantly. Others show the people of the city, like protesters during the Fish Wars and those involved with various labor movements, she said.
Given the historical context of the photos, and the unvarnished glimpse into the past they provide, Trammell also said the Northwest Room preserved the captions that were included and the subjects The News Tribune filed them under. For instance, a series of photos from the 1980s — depicting people attending various pride rallies and LGBTQ rights protests — were found in a file marked “homosexuals.”
Trammell said all of it — from the photos themselves to the way they were categorized by the newspaper that created them more than 30 years ago — help illuminate Tacoma’s complicated history, good and bad.
“The News Tribune is ... the publication that has documented (Tacoma) since the early, early days, and so it’s something that we use all the time,” Trammell said. “Now people will have these images that really just cover so much of Tacoma’s history that was not covered by any of our other existing collections.”
According to Pedersen, working with the Northwest Room to preserve The News Tribune’s in-house archives was a natural fit.
“When we were preparing to move out of our building, one of the most common questions we heard was what would The News Tribune do with its archives. After just a few conversations with the talented people at the Northwest Room, we found a great partner who was prepared to digitize and turn a large part of our community’s history into accessible files not just for The News Tribune but for the public as well,” Pedersen said.
“I’m thrilled with their quick turnaround on this project and that there is now widespread access to sometimes never-before-seen archives,” Pedersen added.
For Tacoma Public Library and The Northwest Room, the debut of photos made available by The News Tribune is only part of next week’s big release.
In addition to the digitized material from the newspaper, Trammell said the library will also be making available thousands of digitized items, from donated personal papers and local business and organizational records to maps, videos and audio recordings. Users will be able to find all of it in the Northwest Room’s ORCA (Online Records and Collections Access) database and its grant-funded (and growing) Community Archives Center — which will be available for the first time next week.
Trammell was hired last year, and said one of the Northwest Room’s overarching goals is to provide people with better, more transparent access to its “vast and complex” collection of historical materials. Along with the newly digitized items, users will also be able to search and find descriptions of thousands of items — and more than 120 individual collections — that the Northwest Room has yet to make available online, Trammell said.
While many of these collections have technically been housed in the Northwest Room’s archives for years, previously there was very little way for the public to find or utilize them, Trammell said.
“I started Feb. 1 of 2021, and we pretty immediately started talking about what we can do to make our collections more accessible and discoverable,” Trammell said. “So it’s taken us a little over a year to get to this point.”
Since taking the helm at the Northwest Room, Trammell said library staff have made it a point of emphasis to make sure the library’s archives better reflect communities that have historically been underrepresented.
The old photos that once lived in those News Tribune file cabinets only aid the library’s mission, Trammell said.
“We were thrilled by the opportunity to be the home for this content, because we recognize the value of the work that has appeared in the Tacoma News Tribune over the decades of its operations,” Trammell said.
“We have these unique pieces of evidence of the people and places and the built environment of Tacoma, captured by the TNT.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
