The Castle on the Hill: Stadium High School
Near Tacoma, Washington
The building that anchors the north end of Tacoma's downtown bluff looks like something transplanted from the Loire Valley. Turrets. Steep copper-green roofs.
Roman brick walls that have oxidized to a color between rust and gold. If you didn't know better, you might assume it was a nineteenth-century government building or a private club for railroad barons. It is a public high school, and its history is one of the stranger stories in American civic architecture.
The Northern Pacific Railway commissioned the building in eighteen ninety-one from the Philadelphia architectural firm of Hewitt and Hewitt. The design was in the Châteauesque style, a fashion borrowed from the French Renaissance chateaux of the Loire, popular among American railway companies in the late Victorian era as a signal of continental sophistication. The building was intended to be the most luxurious railway hotel on the Pacific Coast.
Then the Panic of eighteen ninety-three hit. The Northern Pacific went into receivership. Construction stopped.
The unfinished hulk sat on the bluff above Commencement Bay, too expensive to complete, too imposing to demolish. In October of eighteen ninety-eight, a fire gutted the interior, leaving the stone and brick exterior standing like a roofless ruin. The Tacoma School District purchased the structure in nineteen hundred and four and hired local architect Frederick Heath to redesign it as a school.
Heath kept the dramatic exterior and rebuilt the interior for educational use. The school opened in September of nineteen hundred and six. Frederick Heath also designed the Stadium Bowl immediately adjacent, an outdoor amphitheater with original seating for thirty-two thousand, between nineteen nine and nineteen ten.
In nineteen ninety-nine, a film crew arrived to shoot a high school romantic comedy called Ten Things I Hate About You, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. The school's improbable chateau roofline and the Stadium Bowl became the backdrop for a contemporary teenage love story. The building, which was supposed to be a hotel that became a ruin that became a school, had now also become a movie set.
It continues to serve as an active public school.
