The Great Tacoma Brick Famine
A supply chain crisis at a Renton monopoly grinds Tacoma’s infrastructure projects to a halt.
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.
Several miles of prominent streets in Tacoma are now torn up for paving and they are likely to be closed for traffic most of the summer owing to a brick famine. All Tacoma streets are being put in with brick gutters. It does not require many bricks comparatively, but it will take several million to fix up all the contracts now on. The contractors are at the mercy of the brick monopoly at Renton. The brick plant is capable of turning out just so many and the demand comes from all over the Northwest. There is no place else to go when Renton fails and the only thing to do is wait. In Seattle, the situation was just as bad and some contracts there have been changed by cutting out the brick entirely. Currently, I street, J street, Center street, and Prospect hill are all being held back. A contractor said today that Tacoma is getting only 8,000 bricks a day when this city should be getting 100,000. If City Engineer Davis can find anything on his eastern trip to break the power of the brick monopoly, he will take advantage of it. At the present time, however, the city is up against it.
“The contractors are at the mercy of the brick monopoly at Renton... there is no place else to go when Renton fails.”
Infrastructure delays caused by supply chain bottlenecks remain a constant frustration in Tacoma’s rapid development. The reliance on a single monopoly to provide critical materials echoes modern struggles with specialized regional manufacturing and labor shortages in municipal contracting.
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