The Railroad Barricade
Tacoma citizens push to break the Northern Pacific’s chokehold on the city 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 people of Tacoma are becoming keenly alive to the necessity which exists for breaking the barricades which the Northern Pacific has erected along four miles of the waterfront, in its efforts to keep all other railroads out and preserve for itself the transportation business of this community. Public sentiment is becoming aroused. The wide-awake citizens of Tacoma see that the Northern Pacific is bending all its energies to make a terminal station out of Seattle and a way station out of Tacoma. The throwing out of vague promises of larger shops in Tacoma and the gift of a railway hospital—which is a sop to keep the city in good humor—will deceive none except the stupid. The railroad intends to keep the town 'bottled up' while it turns to Seattle, where competition is welcomed, to seek additional business. It is a very good game for the Northern Pacific, but it is a blightingly poor game for the people of Tacoma who are determined to assert their freedom from such attempted ownership.
“The Northern Pacific is bending all of its energies nowadays to make a terminal station out of Seattle and a way station out of Tacoma.”
This 1904 editorial highlights a classic Tacoma struggle: the tension between corporate monopoly and the city's desire for regional economic parity. The fight to 'break the barricade' on the tide flats echoes a century of later debates about who controls the waterfront and the city's long-standing competitive anxiety relative to Seattle.
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