After completing the bookstore task, along with something called Cake Pops from the adjacent Starbucks, David, Theo & Ruby led us across the Bridge of Glass to the Thea Foss Waterway.
I usually incorrectly refer to this waterway as Theo Foss, likely due to one of my favorite nephews being named Theo. However, Thea Foss was a Tacoma mill operator over a century ago, operating her mill in what is now known as the Thea Foss Waterway.
The Thea Foss Waterway was part of the Commencement Bay Superfund site. The final Superfund cleanup was finished in 2006. After the cleaning was complete an entity called the Foss Waterway Development Authority Board took over.
At the time of my previous visit (August 2008) to the Thea Foss Waterway a couple residential developments had sprung up, along with office space and restaurants and a marina. The promenade/esplanade, at that point in time, was maybe a mile long. In 2008 there were some water features, mostly tied into the Museum of Glass.
By the time of my recent walk along the Thea Foss Waterway, in August of 2017, multiple new water features, and other features, have been added. Along with several more residential buildings, and restaurants. And the promenade/esplanade has been extended under one of Tacoma's actual signature bridges.
That signature bridge comment is what is known as a dig. Directed at one of Fort Worth's ongoing embarrassments. That being referring to three simple little bridges slowly being built over dry land as signature bridges. Those Fort Worth bridges are being slowly built as part of a project overseen by the Trinity River Vision Authority.
The Trinity River Vision Authority has been boondoggling along during the same time frame as the Foss Waterway Authority Vision, only with the Tacoma vision you have this alien to Fort Worth concept known as, well, a successful, mostly completed, project.
With the Tacoma project coming about without using the property stealing technique so popular in Fort Worth and Tarrant County, known as abusing eminent domain.
Let's take a walk with David, Theo & Ruby and see some of what Tacoma has built during the time frame Fort Worth has dawdled.
Added since my last visit is the water feature you see above, on the promenade/esplanade near the Museum of Glass. Water flows down those glass tubes.
Here you see Ruby at the far side of the above oval area, playing music on one type of instrument, whilst Theo & David make louder music on some giant chimes. That blue water is part of the Thea Foss Waterway, now used as a marina, among other uses.
And now David, Theo and Ruby, and their parental units are about to walk under that aforementioned Tacoma signature bridge, built over water, in way less than four years. Fort Worth's pitiful little bridges began construction way back in 2014, with construction sputtering off and on, originally with an astonishing four year construction timeline, recently stretched to some year in the 2020s.
Above David is in the distant lead, leading me, Ruby & Theo up the stairs which lead to the Museum of Glass and the Bridge of Glass.
The Theo Foss Waterway is at the south end of Commencement Bay, at the far south end of the Tacoma waterfront. Several miles to the north is an equally impressive waterfront development, known as Point Ruston.
Pont Ruston did not exist during my visit to Tacoma in 2008. I blogged about Point Ruston whilst I was in Washington, including video, in a blogging titled Point Ruston Ruby, Theo & David Surrey Survey Of Tacoma's New Waterfront Development.
I likely will be blogging a followup blogging about Point Ruston, due to being freshly appalled at the slow motion nonsense of Fort Worth's Trinity River Central City Uptown Panther Island District Vision, bizarrely touted as a vital flood control/economic development scheme, so vital it has been dawdling along in slow motion most of this century, taking property by abusing eminent domain, depending on federal dollar handouts to pay for the ongoing debacle, attracting zero real private investment.
And then there is Tacoma's Point Ruston. And the Thea Foss Waterway...
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