Point Defiance: The Park That Almost Wasn't Public

The point of land that juts into the narrows at the northwestern edge of Tacoma is seven hundred and sixty acres of mostly undisturbed forest pressing down to two-hundred-and-fifty-foot bluffs above the water. Walk far enough into it and you find Douglas firs that have been standing since roughly fifteen hundred and seventy, trees that were mature before Europeans arrived on this coast. The park has been here in some form since eighteen eighty-eight, when President Grover Cleveland authorized its conversion from a military reservation to public use.

The military had held the point since the eighteen-forties, when survey expeditions identified it as a natural defensive position commanding the narrows. It was never significantly fortified or used in combat. When local citizens petitioned for the land to be opened to the public, Cleveland agreed.

In nineteen hundred and five, President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation transferring full ownership of the point to the city of Tacoma. Point Defiance Zoo opened in eighteen ninety-one, making it one of the older municipal zoos in the American West. An aquarium was added in nineteen thirty-three.

The Five Mile Drive, a scenic road looping through the park, was constructed in nineteen thirteen. Fort Nisqually, a reconstruction of the Hudson's Bay Company trading post that operated in this region from eighteen thirty-three onward, sits within the park, a reconstructed reminder that the fur trade predated American settlement here by more than a decade. What the point also sits on, in its southwestern corner, is land that required extensive environmental remediation before it could be opened to visitors.

The Dune Peninsula, which extends from the park's southern edge, occupies a former site contaminated by decades of industrial operations associated with the ASARCO smelter. When the peninsula opened in two thousand and nineteen, the city named the walking trail along it the Frank Herbert Trail, in honor of the author of Dune, who was born in Tacoma and drew his vision of a vast desert planet from the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. The connection between the man who wrote about a poisoned, contested landscape and the remediated peninsula is not accidental.