Olympia Time

Washington State is getting invoices.

The Washington State Department of Transportation headquarters on Olympia’s East Capitol Campus feels like a relic of a rapidly vanishing era of government buildings.

It was the sign that got me first.

When you walk into Tumwater Falls Park, the Olympia Tumwater Foundation office is on your left and the WDFW hatchery facility on your right, directly ahead of you is the uppermost falls in the park.

Somebody in the Daily Olympian newsroom set the type for a headline on election night in 1896 that would have sounded impossible two years earlier.

Maytown was flooded before it had a name.

A few weeks back I wrote about a version of Olympia and Thurston County that kept its streetcars, tied them into regional rail, and grew up into something closer to a Pacific Northwest urbanist’s dream.

For the first time in over fifty years, more people in Thurston County live inside a city than outside one.

Washington spent thirty-six years as a territory before Congress finally granted statehood in 1889.

Last week, when I wrote about the sale of the South Sound Center by Bob Blume’s family to a real estate developer quietly closed a chapter for a region whose very geography Blume had shaped through his mid-century ambitions.