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Photograph of Old City Hall Historic District
Photograph by Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Old City Hall Historic District

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

From the record

“The Old City Hall Historic District is located on a bluff at the north end of Tacoma's business district, overlooking Commencement Bay. The Old City Hall and the Northern Pacific Office Building stabilize the northern boundary of the district and the Pantages Theatre/Jones Building just south of the district boundary, complements the Winthrop Hotel.”

Wikipedia article Old City Hall Historic District, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 215 National Register listings published here for Pierce County · listed in 1977 · category: District.

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

The listing

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 Historic District 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 ceremony1

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

DateCause SizeReported by Name on the report
18 April 2002Recreation and ceremonyunder an acreWashington State Department of Natural Resources Headquartersnot 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 Historic District: 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.

Where SiteCommodity StatusRecorded
(Facility) Asarco RefineryCopper, Nickel, ArsenicPlant
Tacoma Reduction PlantAluminum, Contained or MetalPlant1943
Christel PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
County Line PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
Gravel PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
Gravel PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
Hylebus PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
Lidford PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
Marshall Ave. PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast Producer
McKinney PitSand and Gravel, ConstructionPast 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.

WhenEvent Place namedHarm What the report says
May 1997Tornado (F1)Tacoma$150,000A 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 2015Heavy RainTacoma$50,000A 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 2013Heavy RainTacoma$50,000Heavy 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.

Photograph PropertyDistance Listed
Old City Hallunder 500 feet1974
Northern Pacific Office Buildingunder 500 feet1976
Rhodes Medical Arts Building0.1 miles1978
Bowes Building0.1 miles1979
Pantages Theatre0.1 miles1976
Y.M.C.A. Building0.1 miles1983

Sources for this property

National Archives recordThe nomination case file for reference 77001352 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia articleCommunity-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Pierce CountyAll 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.