About thirty minutes south of Seattle, Tacoma juts northward into Puget Sound with Commencement Bay to the east and the Tacoma Narrows to the west. Mount Rainier looms on the southern horizon and the Olympic Mountains fill the western skyline — on a clear day the views here rival anything in Seattle.
Tacoma spent decades living down its “Smellcoma” reputation, earned from the paper-pulp mills that once dominated the waterfront. The mills are largely gone now, and the city has reinvented itself around the arts. Rental rates well below Seattle’s have drawn painters, glassblowers, and musicians south, and the results show in a walkable downtown anchored by the Museum of Glass, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Washington State History Museum.
The Museum of Glass, designed by Arthur Erickson and opened in 2002, is worth visiting for the architecture alone — a tilted steel cone inspired by the region’s lumber kilns. Dale Chihuly’s Bridge of Glass connecting the museum to Union Station is a Tacoma landmark. Beyond the museums, the city has solid food and drink options along 6th Avenue and in the Stadium District, and easy access to Point Defiance Park, one of the largest urban parks in the country. The Prairie Line Trail links the waterfront to the University of Washington Tacoma campus through a corridor of restored historic warehouse buildings. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the west is famous for its predecessor’s spectacular 1940 collapse.