The Aroma of Tacoma: A City and Its Smell

For most of the twentieth century, Tacoma had a reputation that arrived before you did. Traveling south from Seattle on a clear day, you could smell it before you saw it, a dense, sulfurous odor that locals compared to rotten eggs and visitors compared to the interior of a refinery. The city had a nickname for it: the Aroma of Tacoma.

The word aroma was tied to Tacoma in print as early as nineteen oh one, when a resident named George Francis Train wrote a rhyming cheer setting Tacoma's aroma against Seattle's death rattle, and the full phrase was in common use by the early nineteen forties. The sources of the smell were multiple. The Simpson Tacoma Kraft pulp and paper mill, which operated on the industrial tideflats about a mile and a half from the Tacoma Dome, released total reduced sulfur compounds, the same chemicals that give geothermal vents and stagnant marshes their characteristic odor.

Nearby operations including a rendering plant and an oil refinery added their own contributions. The bay itself, after decades of industrial activity, held contaminated sediment that could off-gas under certain conditions. Research conducted in two thousand and three established that the Aroma of Tacoma had contributed to a measurable long-term depression in housing prices across the city.

The smell had economic consequences. The problem diminished in the early two thousands when the pulp mill installed new combustion technologies that reduced sulfur emissions significantly. The smell never fully disappeared while the mill operated.

In September of twenty twenty-three, the WestRock paper mill, the successor operation, closed permanently. By that point, the Aroma of Tacoma had lasted more than a hundred years. Tacoma residents had complicated feelings about the smell.

Many expressed a kind of local pride in it, the way people can develop affection for a distinctly unpleasant characteristic that is at least unmistakably their own. Bumper stickers appeared claiming that the smell was the smell of money, a reference to the mill jobs that anchored the working-class economy of the tideflats. The smell was both a source of embarrassment and a marker of identity.

When it finally went away, some people said they missed it.