Point Defiance: 760 Acres Where Tacoma Kept Its Wild
A zoo, an old-growth forest, a beach, a fort that never fired a shot — and a peninsula the city simply refused to sell. Point Defiance Park is Tacoma's masterpiece of restraint.
Every city has a park it brags about. Tacoma has a peninsula. Point Defiance Park holds 760 acres at the city's northwest tip — old-growth forest, saltwater beaches on Puget Sound, gardens, the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, Fort Nisqually's living-history fort, and miles of trails through trees that were old when the city was founded.
The land's survival is the story: set aside as a military reservation in the 1860s, transferred to the young city's park district in the early 1900s, and defended ever since against every scheme to subdivide the finest waterfront real estate in the South Sound. What Tacoma got for its restraint is a place where bald eagles nest over a metropolitan shoreline and where, on the Five Mile Drive, traffic slows for deer as a matter of routine.
The modern park layers its centuries carefully: the zoo (founded 1905, now known nationally for its Asian forest and Pacific Seas aquarium), the reconstructed Fort Nisqually, the gardens — rose, iris, Japanese, native plant — kept by generations of volunteers, and Owen Beach's long pebble shore, where summer's crowds give way in November to dog walkers and storm-watchers reading the Narrows weather.
It is also the trailhead of the city's imagination: the Ruston Way waterfront runs from downtown to its gates, and the park's tip looks straight down the Narrows to the bridge. Cities twice Tacoma's size have nothing like it, because at the decisive moment they sold theirs. Tacoma kept the point.
