A Cone of Fire Over the Waterway: The Museum of Glass Made Tacoma a Destination
Dale Chihuly's hometown built a museum to the medium he made famous, cone and all. How the Museum of Glass and the Bridge of Glass rewired what visitors — and Tacomans — think this city is.
The Hot Shop cone is Tacoma's exclamation point: a 90-foot stainless-steel cone rising beside the Thea Foss Waterway, venting the heat of the glass furnaces inside the Museum of Glass, which opened in 2002 in the industrial shoreline of a city that the art world, at the time, barely visited.
The museum was a bet on a native son. Dale Chihuly was born in Tacoma in 1941, and the institution built in his hometown is a working argument for glass as a living art: a hot shop amphitheater where visiting artists and the museum's own team blow glass in public daily, galleries that pair exhibitions with the furnaces that made them, and a rooftop plaza that frames the waterway and Mount Rainier in one turn of the head.
The connective tissue is the Chihuly Bridge of Glass — the 500-foot pedestrian span over I-705 linking the museum to downtown and Union Station, carrying the Seaform ceiling and the Venetian Wall's 2,364 pieces overhead and underfoot. It turned two attractions into one walk, and one walk into the standard Tacoma itinerary: Union Station's rotunda (now a federal courthouse), the Washington State History Museum, UW Tacoma's brick campus, and the cone by the water.
Two decades on, the bet reads as city strategy as much as art: the museum district anchors a downtown that was, within memory, a skyline of boarded windows. November is a fine month to walk it — the furnaces run hot against the cold off the water, and the glass, as always in Tacoma, glows.
