Tacoma Union Station
— — the copper dome holding a century of weather.
Not only on a wall.
“A 1911 Beaux-Arts station with a copper dome that has gone slow green over the harbor light. Trains stopped pulling in long ago. Inside, a Chihuly glass installation hangs where the ticket counters used to stand, and the building keeps working as a federal courthouse. Local light, civic memory, a building that found a second life without losing the first. from the studio
Tacoma Union Station, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tacoma Union Station opened in May 1911, designed by Reed and Stem of New York — the same firm that drew Grand Central Terminal two years later. The building served the Northern Pacific Railway as the western anchor of its transcontinental line. Passenger rail moved to the new Amtrak platform a few blocks east in 1984, and the rotunda sat empty until a 1988 restoration brought it back as the federal courthouse of the Western District of Washington. The copper dome rises 90 feet over the floor and is one of the largest of its kind in the country.
The exterior is buff brick and terra cotta, the interior is plaster and marble, and the rotunda is now hung with Dale Chihuly's Monarch Window, End of the Day Chandelier, and several smaller pieces installed in 1994. Chihuly grew up in Tacoma and the station was the first major public home of his glass in his hometown — the work that helped seed the Museum of Glass and the Chihuly Bridge of Glass that opened a few blocks south in 2002.
The rotunda is open to the public on weekdays during courthouse hours, free of charge, with security screening at the door. The glass reads best in late afternoon when light comes through the south arch and across the dome. The station sits at the south end of downtown's Pacific Avenue, two blocks from the Washington State History Museum and a short walk over the Chihuly Bridge to the Museum of Glass on Thea Foss Waterway.