A Week in Seattle - An Evening in Tacoma

We spent the last night of our trip staying with some old friends in Tacoma. While most people might not think of Tacoma as a tourist destination, there are some really interesting things to see there. We drove around Point Defiance Park for a bit, then headed over to the old downtown area and the old warehouse district that is now home to the University of Washington Tacoma campus. They have done a great job of cleaning up that area, and with the conversion of the old Union Station to a Federal courthouse complex, and joining it by bridge to the Museum of Glass complex across the rail yards, have created a quite a nice area of town. There are still some shady characters wandering around, especially at night, but it is a lot better than it used to be.


While we were waiting for the sky to darken up a bit (in order to fully appreciate the Chihuly Bridge of Glass) we had a bit of dinner at Stanley and Seafort's, a traditional chop house style restaurant that sits up on a hill with a great view of downtown. 

The bone-in ribeye was cooked perfectly medium-rare, and paired well with a glass of Guinness.

After dinner we cruised downtown. The lowriders were out, the light was getting nice, I guess you could call this a drive-by shooting, since I was holding the camera out the passenger window of the car as we were stopped at the light.

The 500-foot long pedestrian-only Chihuly Bridge of Glass connects the downtown near the old Union Station to the waterfront and the Museum of Glass, which sits on the other side of the railroad tracks. It is full of glass sculptures, which are lit at night. The domed building to the right is the old Union Station. (I'll apologize in advance for the slightly blurry night shots, these were all shot handheld, as I did not have my tripod with me.)

In this shot the old Union Station is just out of view to the left, and the Museum of Glass is just of out view to the right.

While the views from the bridge may be nice, it's what's on the bridge itself that is truly spectacular.

The background of that giant display case is translucent, so you can actually see the lights of the city and the traffic on the roadway below.

The sculptures in the shot above are on a wall on the side of the bridge, the ones below are from a series of backlit panels that form the ceiling of a tunnel on another part of the bridge.

Looking out towards the waterfront, a long ramp leading down to the Museum of Glass.

The old Union Station, which has been renovated and converted to the Federal Courthouse, is beautifully done. By the time we got there the building was locked up for the night, so we could not go inside to see all of the glass art on display. That's a bronze statue of a train traveler standing in front.

Click here to see more images from our brief visit to Tacoma.
  
Click here to see more galleries from our week in Seattle, June 13 - 19, 2010.