Imagine, for a moment, how nice it would be to take an open car drive through the North End. Nothing fancy, no decorations, parasols, long white dresses or fake swans on the hood, just a nice drive along familiar streets about 100 years ago. Well here you are.
Not sure how this spellbinding piece of motion picture film survived but Dave Burns unearthed it for us to enjoy a century after the cameraman panned the streets of Tacoma’s North End from the window of a late teens automobile. Marshall McClintock from the North Slope neighborhood has done an amazing job of identifying the homes and structures in the film, those both lost and surviving. You’ll see the houses on Yakima Avenue, E Street and many other roadways now shaded by trees that were only saplings when the movie was made. As you roll along in your time machine set to about 1920, its interesting to see what you remember from from the present.
tacoma history 