Five years ago I worked for Tacoma’s Convention & Visitor Bureau marketing the region to tourists. The biggest part of my job was organizing a five-day convention of travel writers who came to discover what Tacoma had to offer tourists.



After the trip, each writer left me with his or her impression of Tacoma and the surrounding region.



Kerrick James, a travel photographer at the convention, scribbled out his thoughts right before boarding a seaplane leaving from the Thea Foss and heading for the San Juans. His impressions have stuck with me ever since, and I still keep a copy of what he wrote: “Tacoma is clearly a Renaissance in progress: fascinating, fragile, an exercise in hope, faith, vision and guts.”



Hope. Faith. Vision. And Guts.



I love that description of our city. It’s better than “gritty,” maybe even better than “City of Destiny.” I picture it as our new moniker: “Tacoma: an Exercise in Faith, Hope, Vision, and Guts.”



But recently I’ve realized that perhaps I’ve been ignoring the rest of what James said. I forgot that key word he slipped in there: fragile.



Tacoma, what we have built together is dangerously fragile.



The beginning of Tacoma’s rebirth lies in our worst years — the late 1970s. Harold Moss, the first African-American on the City Council and later Mayor of Tacoma, described the downtown streetscape of that era in graphic terms: “bombed out,” looking more like “downtown Beirut” than downtown Tacoma. Portions of streets were barricaded in an attempt to curb car-to-pedestrian drug traffic. “Streets were abandoned, storefronts were abandoned,” and for as much as was going on “City Hall was the headstone and Union Station the footstone” on the grave of downtown.



Ouch.



“I don’t know how businesses like LeRoy survived,” Moss told me.



I decided to check in on LeRoy. Steph Farber took over LeRoy Jewelers from his father, Irving, during the same time. Irving Farber started the store in 1941 that still operates on Broadway in the Theater District. His recollection of the time mirrored Moss’s.

“We were the corner store for a while,” he says. “The only problem was we were in the middle of the block, but since there were no other stores, we were the ‘corner store’ for both Ninth and 11th.”



Farber’s store sits in the middle of what I call Tacoma’s “Experimentation Zone.” Trying to bring people back downtown, the city tried a number of ideas, most of which failed miserably. Among the many that were tested near Farber’s store were:

• Escalades — moving ramps up the hill which were supposed to encourage foot traffic


• One-way streets — which were somehow supposed to generate more activity, though I haven’t quite figured out how


• Monstrous parking garages, perhaps to give the escalade users a place to park


• And — one of the biggest debacles — closing Broadway to car traffic and creating a pedestrian mall called “Broadway Plaza”

All failed to help revitalize downtown.



So what strategies did work?



Those that came from the ground up.



“The best thing that’s happened in Tacoma has been the participation at the grassroots level,” Farber says. He points to what he calls the “seven women with brooms” who started the ball rolling on the renovation of the Roxy movie theater (now the Pantages).

“The seven women went to Weyerhaeuser looking for a grant for the project. Weyerhaeuser insisted on doing a feasibility study first. The results of the study convinced them that there was a market for additional projects in Tacoma. With evidence that money could be made here, Cornerstone — Weyerhaeuser’s development arm at the time — started work with the city to build the Financial Center and the Sheraton Hotel (now the Hotel Murano).”



Over the next couple of decades, more development followed: public projects such as the University of Washington Tacoma, the Washington State History Museum, Union Station, the Convention Center, and the Link; nonprofit development such as the Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Art Museum; and private development, such as the restoration of the Perkins and the Harmon into condos and lofts.



Those stories are well known, but behind them, Farber says, it still came down to individual Tacomans who have sought to make a difference.



“To cite (Tacoma historian) Murray Morgan, Tacoma’s never really had ‘city fathers’ to turn to for funding. The closest we ever came was the Executive Council for a Greater Tacoma. But really, this is a community where individuals can — and do — lead the way. You don’t have to be a big executive or a millionaire to help make things happen.”

Interestingly, Moss too called out civic participation as the single best change in Tacoma in the last 30 years. More so than any individual project or development or initiative, both he and Farber agreed that it was Tacomans engaging with their city government and urban issues that have done the most good.



To put it another way, it was our collective hope, faith, vision, and guts.



This gets us back to that other word: fragile.



The reason our continued success is so fragile is that it relies on our civic participation to keep us going. If we let adversity get in our way — and there’s plenty of adversity right now — then we’re sunk.



Looking back, I wonder if those Tacomans who lobbied for change would have persevered if they’d known there were decades of struggle ahead.



Browsing through the archives of the Northwest Room at the Tacoma Public Library, it’s easy to find people talking about how the rebirth of Tacoma was just around the corner. Speaking about recent vandalism in 1982, a public official said, “As we bring more people down here, that will become a deterrent itself. The problem may well take care of itself.” A year later, another official was confident that “vandals are likely to be discouraged by the expected influx of people.”



Thanks to a couple of decades of hindsight, we know that there was no imminent influx of people. In fact, a lot of us are still waiting.



Maybe the continued belief that Tacoma’s not finished has actually worked to our advantage. If we keep seeing a better city ahead, then we’ll keep working toward it.

Tacoma would be a very different city to live in if we all agreed that there really wasn’t anything we wanted to fix.



Farber compared Tacoma to Sisyphus, the king from Greek mythology who was forever cursed to roll a rock up a hill only to have it fall back to the bottom right before reaching the top. “But unlike him,” Farber says, “the rock doesn’t go back as far every time it rolls back down the hill. We are making progress.” It’s just slow going.



Perhaps that’s best seen in the pictures of Stephen Cysewski, who took pictures of downtown Tacoma in the early 1980s, which are online.  The Tacoma pictured in them is empty, dilapidated, and boarded up. There is a certain beauty in them as photographs. But as a place to live, well, compare them to the city today, and the progress is evident.

I know some believe that we have lost something during the slow restoration of downtown. I am not one of them. Tacoma cannot escape its past. Cysewski’s photos show our roots, and we’re not going to grow out of them.



Looking ahead, as we prepare for an uncertain 2009, we need to make sure that we keep our eye on the ball, er, keep our eye on the rock. Because we are Sisyphus. And our rock is beginning to feel like it’s sliding back down the hill again, pulled by gravity and the economic crisis.



And we’re going to need some people to start pushing it back up — people with hope, faith, vision, and guts.



Photography used in Mary K Johnson's cover design by Stephen Cysewski, professor of Computer Applications, Emeritus, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Link: www.cysewski.com/settleweb/tacoma