The University That Moved Into the Warehouse District: UW Tacoma at Middle Age
Founded in 1990 in downtown's old brick warehouses, the University of Washington Tacoma turned a dying warehouse row into a campus — and a campus into an economic strategy.
The University of Washington Tacoma began in rented rooms in 1990 and made its defining decision a few years later: instead of a suburban greenfield, the new campus would renovate the brick warehouse district along Pacific Avenue — the Perkins, Long and West Coast Grocery buildings — and grow inside Tacoma's historic bones.
It worked the way urbanists say it should. The campus's grand staircase climbs the hill from Pacific Avenue through the district; thousands of students — most of them from the South Sound itself, many the first in their families at a university — fill the coffee shops and apartments of a downtown that had emptied out a generation earlier. Enrollment runs around five thousand, with strengths in computing, business, education, nursing and social work aimed squarely at the region's workforce.
The campus is also a preservation engine: its buildings have won awards for adaptive reuse, and its growth plan treats the surrounding blocks — the Brewery District below, the museum row beside it — as partners rather than frontiers. The 'Prairie Line Trail' through campus follows the old Northern Pacific rail line that once made Tacoma the terminus of a transcontinental railroad; the university quite literally walks its students along the city's founding infrastructure.
November is the academic year's stride — midterms graded, winter registration open, the Milgard School of Business and the School of Engineering and Technology feeding interns into the port, the hospitals and Joint Base Lewis-McChord. UW Tacoma was a bet that a university could raise a downtown. From the top of the grand staircase, the bet looks won.
