The Pile-Driver Politics of Tacoma’s Waterfront
When the Tacoma Land Company locked the city’s citizens away from the bay, one local activist took a stand with a pile driver, a small cabin, and a vision for an open waterfront.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Court House was crowded in response to a call of the Union Labor party to nominate candidates. Jacob C. Mann and John R. Burns were nominated for Mayor. Burns declined but asked the privilege of making a political speech. 'Something more than two years ago I had the honor to be a member of the Council,' Burns said, 'and while that was looked upon as being opposed to the Tacoma Land Company, I incurred their displeasure and was opposed by the corporation on the stump. The Tacoma Land Company had prepared a preamble and set of resolutions to the effect that the water front was locked up and setting forth the necessity of breaking through, if the citizens expected to reach God’s great highway. For introducing this and insisting on the floor and dictating it until it was spread upon the Journal of that body, I was ignominiously kicked out of the Council. The administration that looked out from the free sea had but a few little gaps in its entire length, and which clipped away from them. I saw that the only way in which we could get to the water was to reach it from the mud flats, and I started with two or three others. I undertook to retain them, and the result was a battle of pile drivers. We spent $6,000 driving piles, and built a little cabin in the middle. Now I wish to say that I am going to do some more pile driving, and when finished I will have a road on route extending from Fifteenth street out to that little cabin. That is the reason I cannot accept the nomination.'
“The water front was locked up... the only way in which we could get to the water was to reach it from the mud flats, and the result was a battle of pile drivers.”
Burns’s frustration with a powerful land company monopolizing the shoreline echoes modern Seattle’s ongoing struggles with public access to the waterfront and the control exerted by large corporate developers over civic space.
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