Our cities tour visits tacoma, washington, to learn more about its unique history and literary life. For six years, we have traveled to u. S. Cities, bringing the literary scene and Historic Sites to our viewers. You can read more at cspan. Org citiestour. Years before the arrival of the Transcontinental Railroad, tacoma was not dissimilar from most of the other small communities around puget sound, and really in the Pacific Northwest. The population presence was predominantly native american. By the end of the 19th century, coming over the oregon trail and some by sea, small little villages really of europeans had theved, that mostly along shoreline, and that was because the primary purpose here for people settling was cutting timber and milling timber that was then sent down to San Francisco. That prompted a lot of entrepreneurs and small investors and adventurers to come up and begin to build cities. So, seattle, bellingham, wereetown, olympia all ofll, smallish communities 50 to a few hundred people, really, prior to the coming of the transcontinental. At the conclusion of the civil war and the announcement that the railroad was coming, every hoped that they would be the terminal city, that they would be chosen for the railroad. It came down to really being seattle, tacoma, and olympia. 1873, the transcontinental obviously was being built in two directions. It did not just have one railhead. , congress,ision was in the charter for the railroad, had dictated that the section between the river and puget sound needed to be completed, and the Railroad Company needed to bring steam engines by december of 1873. , the trackshat year ,ad been laid from the columbia and in july of that year, all the time the railroad had been entertaining offers from various communities cash, land, port facilities, whatever a community could put together to lower the railroad there lure the railroad there. In july, the final decision between seattle and tacoma was made, and tacoma was selected. , the choice city for the conclusion of the line was set up to not only be an arrival point for goods and theelers, but also for arrival of the telegraph, which muse and banking and communication. The course of the Transcontinental Railroad at the end of the 19th century was a big deal for the far west. The reason tacoma was picked by mp, there are a multitude of reasons, but primarily it is a perfect partner, especially for sailing vessels. But even today, it is an ideal harbor. , lots of areaor harfs. Nearby solid ground which would carry the weight of freight and railroads. You would be able to load goods often on the ships. That was part of it. Another reason was the railroad was built on land grants. The federal government basically divided the whole route into squaremile blocks, and surveyed , like athe railroad checkerboard, got every other parcel as payment for visiting the railroads. In seattle, most of seattle had already been state claimed and was owned by the residents of seattle. Tacoma, a much smaller population. The railroad came here because they could literally on the city, and indeed they did. When they arrived here and thats part of tacomas first half of its life. The railroad came in and they can to profit off the sale of land within the city. Land, which forest was practically valueless when trees were cut, to real estate that they could profit off of. They brought with them and they were able to turn around and profit from it. We see that today too, because not only did the railroad owned the land and thereby known the terms by which they would sell the land if somebody wanted to build a building or whatever, ehouse, but in the or ehouse, but or a you very much sense that today here on the campus. These sturdy brick warehouses were all built under the guidelines that were imposed by the railroad. So the builders of the ,arehouses would meet the term the cash terms to buy the land from the railroad but the railroad dictated the design, the construction method of the buildings themselves. So all these warehouses, these sturdy fireproof warehouses are thepretty much the idea, forced building standards the railroad had. 1930s, and into the 1940s, the neighborhood began to receive a little bit as the automobile took over and passenger traffic by rail faded away. Warehouses still remained in operation that as the court modernized, a lot of the big warehouses and hardware, all the goods that came and went moved out into the industrial port area. Became almostne forgotten in a way. It was still utility, it was still used but not appreciated or understood. After the Second World War, it serviceeven passenger largely stopped. Last acid or service stop traveling. By the 1990s, the city itself began to go through a real revival and because of the sturdy wellbuilt infrastructure , the built environment, the recovery of the city largely happened around the reuse of the Historic Holdings that were already here. It was during that time that people began to realize, wait a minute, the origin of the city is still intact, it is still here and it is still functioning. The 1990s, and into the current century after 2000, the theus launched university of washington launched the campus. They moved to the Warehouse District to begin buying up the old empty warehouses and building a modernday campus. About 2010,ago, with the expansion of the library, for the first time, people began to talk about intruding on the 80 foot rightofway of the parry line very line. There was conversation and building out the campus and meeting its needs that they would start to encroach and then the 80y remembered that foot rightofway is where everything started and the University Made a very courageous decision to keep the rightofway as open space, to keep the loading docks is covered pedestrian ways and to keep as much as they could of the language of the railroads still intact and today, the prairie lion as you see it although it has been hard forped and modernized campus use, for pedestrian use, because real do not use it anymore, it is now this linear central open space of the campus. For people coming here, they do not just enjoy a modern campus. They get a very authentic look to,he narrative of not just to, but a chapter of history. Clicks this is a perfect setting to tell this type of story because too often this kind of public spaces just about the aesthetics. It is just about enjoying the Natural Beauty that is all around puget sound. It is important to point out to people the history of this place and the complicated history and thiswent into founding beautiful place, these are part of the same story. The fact youre able to enjoy this you have to understand why youre here and enjoying this part of tacoma. In the early 1880s there started to be a growing sense of antichinese sentiment. In the 1870s, they were able to get by. The conflict was not as obvious but at the beginning of 1880s there were a series of antichinese incident that happened in other parts of the u. S. And there was as palpable sense it was coming up here. It was driven by complaints by officials and other residents in washington territory that the chinese exclusion act as a have were chinese who are coming through canada and so you get the sense that there was something brewing here. Offebruary of 1885, a group tacoma leaders including the mayor, himself a german immigrant had a meeting at wise box grocery. The came up with ideas of how to deal with population. Something had happened in california, in eureka, northern california, they had expelled their chinese population and there were some residents who were there when it happened and they are coming into that meeting saying maybe there is a way that we could also expel our community so that is how it just that is how it happened. And in the following months, there was this into Chinese Congress that was led by leaders in seattle and tacoma led that would lead meet here occasionally in seattle and the wood, with these plans that came crystallized. Everything went into motion starting in september. Rock springs the massacre happened where 28 chinese miners were murdered by white miners in the area and that set off a chain of events in september happening here in washington territory, there were these isolated incidents of issaquah, chinese in black diamond, in new castle, this growing antagonism against the Chinese Community. What happened was the antiChinese Congress met at the end of september led by Jacob Weisberg and put this plan into motion. When you see our plan saying the chinese population of western Washington News to be out of here by november 1, they set a deadline. That is what happened. In terms of what happened the day of, the november 1 deadline passed and the majority of the population left the city in fear. There were about 500 to 700 chinese people, i the day of the expulsion that were 200. November 3, that is when the expulsion happened. What happened was a mob that was composed of 200 people and swelled to about 500 white to commons went up and down the Chinese Community house by house expelling them. That tried toon fight back or question what was happening, there were instances where it became violent and they were forcefully expelled. You had that month going through the city lining up all the chinese and once they had the mall, the chinese residents were forced to march to the lake train station several miles south to get on a train to go to portland. After the expulsion, there was a legal case to be made, what you going to do to the people that led this act that was clearly illegal . They rounded up 27 of the leaders who became known as the tacoma 27 and it was a hodgepodge of people. You had some of the most , like themembers mayor and others who were workingclass residents. So they were rounded up but they were never brought to trial. Of legal technicalities happened and they were never brought to just and they were free to go back and they were hailed as heroes in the city and there was no legal consequence for what happened. Government issued a lump sum payment of a quarter Million Dollars to the Chinese Government for a series of antichinese incidents including the tacoma expulsion but there is very little in the way of justice in terms of what happened afterwards. The Chinese Community following the expulsion of 1885 was largely nonexistent for decades. It became known as his area that was inherently and hospitable to chinese immigrants. It was not till the mid20th country that you see concerted numbers of Chinese Americans moving into tacoma again and that was because of the legal system. The exclusion act was held into place until world war ii. That is what you do not see a Chinese Community and that is why there was very little in terms of remembrance of the events up until the 1990s. It was a century without any public acknowledgment from the city that this happened. The plans to build chinese reconciliation part were announced in the 1990s through a series of agreements which included a formal apology by the city, the city council for the expulsion. The park wrote ground in 2005 and the first phase was completed in 2010. There are two more phases that are yet to be built that when visitors come to the park what they see is it overlooks this youthful part of tacoma which is commencement bay. You are walking through this walkway and a bridge that leads to this chinese pavilion, the centerpiece of the part. That was constructed in china in one of our sister cities and put together here. That is what visitors can do, they can walk through the park and see different plaques that explain where the chinese 3g used to live and what happened during the expulsion. When people come into the part, a walk away with an understanding that this is a city with a complex history. It is not just this pretty little town next to the water. It has a competition immigrant history like other towns in the American West area and when you look at tacoma it is not that way by accident, overwhelmingly white. Whether we are talking about the displacement of and a generous peoples or the chinese, about the redlining of africanamerican trinitys where they could only live in certain parts of the city, theres a reason the city looks the way it does and this story is an important part of that. That is what visitors take a small part of when they walk away. The area we are standing right now is in the southern section of puget sound which is the Washington State in the Pacific Northwest great inland water. When the Transcontinental Railroad came there was talk about one day being able to spend puget sound. It was not an undertaking anyone was prepared to do. During the depression federal programs like the building of the grand cooley down, that would projects happening. Mid1930s there began to be talk about creating a bridge over puget sound to reach from tacoma to the Kitsap Peninsula. Opened july 1 in 1940 after two years of construction. The tacoma narrows is also a bit of a wind tunnel. People working on the deck again to notice movement. And almost like airplane wing lift in the bridge. Movement theytal began to feel a vertical lift in the bridge, especially in the center stand area is center stand. There was no suspension bridge anything like this anywhere in anywhere of the world in the Pacific Northwest. There was an unfamiliarity with how a big thing like this was supposed to behave so people excited about it, there is a certain musical gracefulness about a bridge like this so people just wanted to think it was not anything wrong, that it was normal and once they get the concrete down they thought it would go away. As we went out of summer and began to get into fall and the winds except a little bit, the prevailing wind out of the southwest was those almost or the on across the bridge deck, they began to notice that there was an undulation in the deck. By fall, soldiers were coming out from the military base for the novelty of writing the bridge so they would go out and kick their feet over the railing and stand on the outside of the ridge and lean out as far as they could and the center deck would be rising not just inches but feet. To a point where the undulation was so severe that to automobiles, trucks and an automobile coming in opposite directions, the headlights of the vehicle coming at you would disappear under the rolling hill of the deck. For conservative people, something was horribly wrong from the beginning. For a community that was proud of their new bridge, for the many people that anticipated in building the bridge, it was unthinkable that this was wrong. The engineers began to work on the idea of some stiffening of the bridge. They thought that the railings on the side could be converted into deep ibeams and that would at some rigidity. Minor structural additions, modifications were implemented or about to be implemented as we got through october 1940. Only fournovember, months, four and a half months after the bridge had been completed, the weather began to shift into its winter pattern. That was the bellwether of what was about to happen on the morning of november 7, though winds picked up to 40 miles an hour and they were fiercely directed at the site of the overe as if the wind comes the wing on an airplane. And instead of the normal undulation of the bridge, the deck again to twist, began to turn, and everybody noticed immediately that had been watching the bridge that that was a behavior people had not noticed before. Of then the morning seventh, there were hundreds of not thousands of people that had come out on both sides of the bridge to be able to start to watch what was happening, to start to us this behavior. The bridge keepers, it was a toll bridge so the bridge keepers had decided they would close the bridge, this was wrong and it was not safe anymore. Just not an action that should happen with an inanimate object of the size. One last car was coming across thebridge even though access to the bridge had been shut off, there was one last car coming across, a man with coming from his summer home on Kitsap Peninsula headed toward tacoma. He had a cocker spaniel with him in the car. By the time he got to the most severely moving part of the bridge deck he could not control the automobile. So the car swung and screeched around and ended up diagonally across both lanes on the bridge and he jumped out and ran and got off the bridge. Minutes,ext 30 or 40 the bridge when into a Violent Movement that no one had seen before. And all the crowds on both sides closed in to watch. There was i think everyone started to suspect that the impossible was about to happen, that the bridge was going to give it up, was going to fail. ,ith no one on the bridge strangely enough, a University Professor who had worked on trying to solve the puzzle, there was enough time for people to get out there, he ran out to the bridge trying to get the dog out of the car and there is great footage of him, it looks like a Steven Spielberg movie. Today you watch that footage and you cannot imagine that somebody would run out onto the bridge with this tearing deck. He got up and the dog was too terrified to get out so he gave up and strolled among he was not down a couple times by the movement. And finally got off the bridge and in the few moments that followed him a the deck for away from the hangers and witnesses talk about it being like listening to gunshots. These bolts that are the cable comes down and goes through the deck and there is a big bolt on the bottom to keep it from pulling out, they began to pop and the cables began to snap under the force. The light standards on the bridge are cutting, swirling across rapidly and catching on the cables in just a moment. The connection between two sections of the bridge deck failed and there is a violent twist and tear of the deck and the moments that followed that im a huge sections began to fail. And most of the center span of the bridge unde