A familiar landmark to generations of Tacoman’s, the Johnny’s Ocean Fish Co. at the Old Town Dock closed earlier this year after Johnny’s was purchased by the nations’ largest seafood company, Pacific Seafood.

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It’s a somewhat fashionable thing right now to look down your nose at the suburbs. Environmentalists and students of urban studies (rightly) point to the energy wasted by single-family houses and the gas guzzled on the trips to the grocery store.

The critique has been in Hollywood for years, but it’s recently become much more prevalent. [...]

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In this series, the Sun explores the city from a thousand feet up. Drawing inspiration from a combination of the cheesy public television “Over..” series, Paul Dorpat’s long running Now & Then column in the Seattle Times, and the newly added Aerial Photography layer of the City of Tacoma’s govME mapping website, we look at [...]

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Part 3 in a series on commercial development in Tacoma.
I’ve been thinking about alleys lately. This topic came up about a year ago over on exit133.com I’ve always been a fan of alleys but became very interested in them several years ago while taking an urban planning course at the University of Washington. Since then, alleys have become one of my many minor obsessions - especially after learning that the public right-of-ways (streets, alleys, sidewalks and parking strips) make up about a quarter of the land mass of most cities - including Tacoma. Of these right-of-ways, alleys receive the least amount of thought and attention. As a result, not much thought has been given to include alleys in the broader context of issues such as urban revitalization and the environment.

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