It used to be that my grandfather, Jim Dickson, had intimate knowledge of many homes in Tacoma. As the owner and proprietor of Dickson TV & Electronics Company Inc., he found himself inside these houses installing state-of-the-art television sets and fixing them when the complicated series of tubes would inevitably fizzle and fade. Part of his job involved maintaining the bunny ears at a local 4-star hotel called the Winthrop.

In his off-time, he'd sometimes take his wife, my grandmother, Glenna, out dancing at the Winthrop. It had a ballroom, you see. With my grandfather's passing, so passed one of the few remaining witnesses to the Winthrop in its prime - and a close observer of the inside of a building that few get to see any more.

Opened on May 16, 1925, the Winthrop Hotel was a glorious bastion of high class and good fortune for Tacoma. By 1972, that shine had faded considerably, and the hotel was converted into apartments. During its tenure as a hotel, it was rarely even close to full occupancy, despite its alluring architecture, in-house shops and breathtaking views. Like some things in Tacoma, it proved to be a non-starter.

Over the years since its transformation into apartments and, finally, low-income housing, the Winthrop has steadily blended into the landscape of downtown Tacoma. It ceased to demand the attention that it did some 85 years ago. The apartments filled with people who couldn't afford much else in the city: people who had fallen on hard times, college students low on funds, elderly who had been displaced by the passing of a spouse. And time marched on.

All the while, as hotel rooms became permanent housing, some rooms in the Winthrop were left to live out their lives as yellowing artifacts of the hotel's glory days. Specifically, the penthouse that looms atop the building, and the ballroom in which my grandparents used to dance, have remained virtually unchanged for years, barred off from access by residents and the general public.

These spaces have continued to crumble, falling subject to time's cruel practice of rendering most things to dust. The penthouse is trapped in a time capsule, its Pepto-pink walls and white cabinetry looking oddly like an abandoned dollhouse. In the ballroom, chandeliers dangle, untouched by the hazy light that leaks in from the windows looking out onto Broadway.

"We went down to the basement," says Todd Matthews, editor of the Tacoma Daily Index. Matthews wrote a series on the Winthrop for the Index, and was one of the first people to take photographs of the untouched areas of the Winthrop when access was granted to him in 2006.

"There's a nuclear fallout shelter down there," continues Matthew. "It's a bunker, you know? A huge bunker. ... The penthouse has been left as it is. It's not in great shape. There are parts where we were walking around where you couldn't see - it was so dark and boarded up. But then there was one part where it was like this little apartment. So that got me hooked."

Much has been said about the possibility of the Winthrop being returned to the way it used to be, of returning it to a stately hotel on the cusp of Commencement Bay. Developer Prium Companies bought it in 2006 with the intention of fixing it up, but the recession hit hard, and Prium proceeded to sit on the property for the next few years. The problem of renovating the Winthrop comes not only with finding the money necessary (estimated at $34 million) to get the building remodeled and up to code, but with the displacement of more than 200 residents.

"A lot of people feel like it's just a dump and that everyone there is a drug dealer," says Matthews. "It's so much more complicated than that."

Last year, Prium offered the property to the Tacoma Housing Authority (THA), the idea being that the THA would be better equipped to handle a low-income housing complex. Notions of restoring the Winthrop have faded away, much like the memories of the Winthrop's zenith.

"I don't think it's going to be turned into a hotel," says Matthews. "Even if it stays as low-income housing, the building still needs a lot of work. ... The building has not been taken care of in years. (Executive director of THA) Michael Mirra had a great comment throughout this, which was something to the effect of, ‘At some point, the building is going to force its own hand, and someone is going to have to do something about it.'"

As people hem and haw about the future of the Winthrop, the building's past continues to grow longer. If no decision is made within the next few years, it's not unthinkable to say that the Winthrop may force one to be made. At 85 years of age, the Winthrop has now outlived the majority of its early guests, its barren ballroom serving as a stark reminder of its steady slide from grace.

Were my grandfather still alive today, I would ask him what it felt like to fix the television of the men that slept in that grand penthouse. To walk through it now, the sensation of opulence must be a distant, faintly echoed memory. Dust is what remains, is what will always remain.

Below the penthouse, above the ballroom, are a number of apartments full of people doing just what the building needs: they are living. Their lifeblood is all that keeps the Winthrop from withering further away, becoming nothing but a shadow in the heart of downtown Tacoma.