Old City Hall

Built in 1893. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

From the record

“The Old City Hall is a five-story building in Tacoma, Washington that served as the city hall in the early 20th century. The building features a ten-story clocktower on the southeast corner, facing the intersection of Pacific Avenue and S 7th Street.”
Wikipedia article Old City Hall (Tacoma, Washington), CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 215 National Register listings published here for Pierce County · listed in 1974 · category: Building · built in 1893.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service · the Wikipedia article

The listing

What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 1 building as contributing to the listing.
Address. 7th Ave. between Commerce and Pacific Ave., Tacoma, 98402
When was it listed? May 1974
Category. building
Census division. Tacoma
When was it built? 1893
National Register reference number. 74001973 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Fires near this property

1 since 2002

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 1 fire within 5 miles of Old City Hall in 2002, burning under an acre in total. None started naturally. None was recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Recreation and ceremony	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
18 April 2002	Recreation and ceremony	under an acre	Washington State Department of Natural Resources Headquarters	not named

Every fire recorded in Pierce County

Mines and quarries near this property

10 of 19 shown

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists 19 workings within 5 miles of Old City Hall: 17 past producers, 2 plants. 2 still produce. What was taken out: Sand and Gravel, Construction, Copper, Nickel, Arsenic, Aluminum, Contained or Metal. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Site	Commodity	Status	Recorded
(Facility) Asarco Refinery	Copper, Nickel, Arsenic	Plant
Tacoma Reduction Plant	Aluminum, Contained or Metal	Plant	1943
Christel Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
County Line Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
Gravel Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
Gravel Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
Hylebus Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
Lidford Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
Marshall Ave. Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer
McKinney Pit	Sand and Gravel, Construction	Past Producer

Every working recorded in Pierce County

Storms near this property

3 since 1997

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Tacoma, the town this property stands in, in 3 storm reports between 1997 and 2015: 2 heavy rain, 1 tornado. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
May 1997	Tornado (F1)	Tacoma	$150,000	A weak tornado touched down in a south Tacoma neighborhood just east of I-5. A church suffered roof and beam damage and several trees were pushed over or snapped off. There were also some downed fences.
October 2015	Heavy Rain	Tacoma	$50,000	A landslide closed southbound Schuster Parkway in Tacoma on the afternoon of Oct 10th after a burst of heavy rain moved through Pierce County. The heavy rain and wind also caused sporadic power outages and some spinouts elsewhere in Pierce County. A part of I-705 was also closed at South 11th Street due to flooding. \|\|Runoff from the heavy rainfall overwhelmed drainage systems near Tacoma's Stadium High School resulting water and debris running through the campus and tumbling into and flooding the football field.
September 2013	Heavy Rain	Tacoma	$50,000	Heavy rain inundated more than 60 units in a mini storage business in Tacoma.\|Tacomas environmental services crews responded to 76 calls of flooding due to heavy rain.

Every storm recorded in Pierce County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

6 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Property	Distance	Listed
Northern Pacific Office Building	under 500 feet	1976
Old City Hall Historic District	under 500 feet	1977
Rhodes Medical Arts Building	0.1 miles	1978
Y.M.C.A. Building	0.1 miles	1983
Bowes Building	0.1 miles	1979
Pantages Theatre	0.2 miles	1976

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 74001973 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Pierce County	All 215 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.