Tacoma, WA

One of Tacoma’s most notable landmarks, Stadium High School, designed by architects Hewitt and Hewitt, was constructed originally to serve as a luxury hotel for the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Tacoma Land Company in 1891. In keeping with other luxury hotels of the late nineteenth century, the building’s design—resembling a French chateau in the Loire Valley—was to inspire and awe visitors with its sheer size and facade detail. Although its history as a hotel was short-lived, its conversion into a high school has kept it in active use for more than a century, and its associated stadium with views to Commencement Bay provides one of the nation’s more spectacular event settings.

Located in what was once known as “Old Woman’s Gulch,” the Stadium Bowl, completed in 1909, featured a 2.5-acre, modified oval-shaped field for athletics and other events; its 31 rows of cast concrete bleachers, built into the steep hillside that drops precipitously away from the main building to the northwest, accommodate as many as 32,000 spectators. As Tacoma’s largest gathering place, the bowl—essentially serving as an amphitheater—hosted a number of major civic events in its early years, including speeches by presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren G. Harding, as well as those from William Jennings Bryan and Babe Ruth. The field was—and still is—used for football and track and field activities, although its seating capacity has been reduced because of erosion. When the complex was essentially complete in 1910, it was arguably the most architecturally exquisite high school in the West. In 1913, it was renamed “Stadium High School”; in that year, a gymnasium was built underneath the main courtyard.