Soaring to New Heights, or ‘Needle Envy’?

Overshadowed for decades by Seattle and its famous Space Needle, this hilly port city on the Puget Sound plans to build its own tall, pointy edifice.

Its working name is the Tacoma Spire. If built from the current design, the spire would rise 400 feet and resemble a very thin pyramid. It would be made of steel, glass and shimmering mesh that would simultaneously reflect and let in light. It would cost about $7 million.

As with any edifice of unconventional design, there’s vigorous debate among citizens, and one of the questions at the center of this argument is whether Tacoma, in the words of one councilman, is suffering from a case of “needle envy.”

“It’s obvious what’s going on,” says Liz Lassoie, a 40-year Tacoma resident and one of the many outspoken critics of the project. “There are people in Tacoma who feel we should compete with Seattle. They have a needle, so we need a needle. But it’s no competition. They’re always going to be bigger.”

Lassoie says the money should be spent on more urgent needs like housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, fixing potholes and keeping libraries open -- the kind of basic services that cities must tend to before moving on to loftier goals.

Those who want the spire say it would be a signature landmark, visible from Interstate 5, that would distinguish the Tacoma skyline and give the city a long-sought symbol to match, or even simply hint at, its moniker -- “City of Destiny.”

Many decades have passed in which that nickname has mocked this blue-collar city of roughly 200,000, the second-largest in the state. There was a time in the late 1800s, after Northern Pacific Railway chose Tacoma as the endpoint of its transcontinental route, when this city was seen as the great future metropolis of the region.

But fortunes changed. The railroad left, and for reasons that have as much to do with luck as ingenuity, Seattle prospered and became what Tacoma once aspired to be.

As Seattle, 36 miles north, rose in stature on the wings of the Boeing Co., Tacoma seemed to fade into an industrial oblivion, dominated by factories and pulp mills that pumped foul wastes into the air. The Aroma of Tacoma it was called.

“Maybe there is some inferiority complex at work,” says Tacoma Councilman Mike Lonergan, referring to his town’s relationship to Seattle. Lonergan opposes the spire. “It seems like Tacoma is in this never-ending effort to put itself on the map.”

The effort has been Herculean for the last 10 years. Gone is the famous aroma. Pulp mills have been replaced by retail and high-tech companies. The city now boasts two of the most picturesque bridges in the state: the Tacoma Narrows and the Thea Foss Waterway. The downtown, once a nondescript sprawl, has borne a new Tacoma Art Museum and a Museum of Glass within walking distance from a convention center that is under construction.

The proposed spire would be part of the convention center. The center’s Canadian-born architect, Wyn Bielaska, insists he was neither trying to compete with the Space Needle nor even setting out to design an icon.

He said he was simply trying to “de-box” the convention center in his drawings by playing with long design lines. At one point a line just kept going higher and higher, and before long a tower stood in the corner of the complex.

The City Council, for the most part, loved the idea, as long as project planners could build it without using taxpayer money. The financing package is still being put together. Part of the plan would be to pay for it by selling naming rights and taking out loans that would be reimbursed by admissions to the top of the tower. At $7 per admission, it could take years to pay off the loan.

The council must address the issue in December if the city hopes to finish the tower at the same time as the convention center, which is scheduled to open in November 2004.

One of the project’s main supporters, City Councilman Kevin Phelps, likes to remind people that Parisians in the late 1880s didn’t approve of the Eiffel Tower and only allowed it to be built on the condition that it be temporary. “They were horrified by it at first,” he says. Today, Paris is inseparable from the tower.

“When icons work, they really work. They give your region an identity,” he says, citing the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. Some people even cite Los Angeles’ new Walt Disney Concert Hall as an attempt at a city icon.

Phelps says it’s immeasurable what these icons generate in terms of dollars and social cachet. The sitcom “Frasier” uses as its logo the Seattle skyline with the silhouette of the Space Needle. “The dividends can pay off for years,” Phelps says.

He says he understands the power of icons to give the mind’s eye a lasting image. He was living in New Orleans at the time the Space Needle was being built for the 1962 World’s Fair. His father was working in the Puget Sound area. “All we talked about was the Space Needle,” he recalls. It was the only thing he knew about Seattle.

“If you said ‘Tacoma,’ what would you think of?” What image comes to mind?

The usual silence after that question, Phelps says, is the reason Tacoma needs the spire.