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A Guide to Labor Heritage Sites in Downtown Tacoma

By 1885, the three-year-old Alpha Opera House was a fixture in the social and political life of Tacomans, serving a variety of community needs. Pacific Railroad Company Presidents Charles Wright and Henry Villard were both received there on visits to the growing city. Tacoma's Presbyterian congregation called it home while waiting to build a permanent site. In 1883, Abigail S. Duniway, a prominent women's suffrage activist from Oregon, spoke at the Alpha in support of pending legislation to extend voting rights to women in Washington Territory. That same year, part of the building was leased for a popular roller-skating rink; in the next year it hosted a boxing exhibition. And in April 1884 Tacoma voters held a nominating convention at the Alpha Opera House where Robert Jacob Weisbach, a prominent figure in the growing political coalition organized around opposition to Chinese labor and residency in the Western U.S, was nominated for Mayor. Weisbach went on to win the election. Following his election, Weisbach presided over surging Tacoma support for driving the Chinese community out of Tacoma. Support was inspired in part by a series of violent acts directed at Chinese neighborhoods and workplaces from California to Wyoming. The sense that Tacoma might soon erupt in violence of its own, and the Mayor’s obvious sympathy for the movement’s more radical proposals, provoked a number of prominent figures in Tacoma’s business and political community to request a public meeting where they could advocate a more subtle approach. Weisbach agreed, calling a meeting at the Alpha Opera House for 7:30pm on Saturday, February 21st, 1885. The meeting was the largest public gathering in Tacoma's history up to that point - 900 people attended, mostly white property-owning men, representing roughly half of Tacoma's voting population. The pro-subtlety businessmen argued that any extra-legal activities would reflect poorly on Tacoma's reputation, damaging the city’s ability to attract new residents and investments, and embarrassing it in the national press. The city could, however, pass new sanitation laws - laws which, everyone agreed, would lead to citations for Chinese neighborhoods and businesses. These would justify legal proceedings to remove the Chinese. Rev. Ward, a prominent Tacoma clergyman, made an additional suggestion: he thought that local landowners and employers might be pressured to stop employing Chinese workers or renting to them. New health and safety regulations were drafted at the Alpha that night, and a social campaign to boycott businesses or landowners supporting Chinese residents was launched there as well. The new health and safety regulations led to inspections of Chinese homes and shops - inspections which found much to criticize. A final report from the investigative committee condemned the Chinese population as unsanitary and socially undesirable. It was read aloud to an audience at the Alpha Opera House during a June 3rd meeting covered in detail by local paper The Ledger. Instead of waiting for the legal consequences, however, Tacoma's citizens concluded that the situation needed more immediate popular action. As the political slogan of Mayor Weisbach and many others had proclaimed for several years, the "Chinese must go," and average Tacomans would make them. Representatives from Tacoma were subsequently sent to a regional meeting on that topic in Seattle where attendees, dominated by the Tacoma delegation, resolved to expel the Chinese community on Nov. 1st, 1885; then all returned home to plan accordingly. On October 3rd, Tacoma’s anti-Chinese forces converged on the Alpha for a meeting to elect the "Committee of Fifteen," whose job it would be to make sure every Chinese person had been notified of the Nov. 1st deadline and was preparing to leave Tacoma. A week later, the Opera House hosted another rally where leaders of the anti-Chinese movement in Tacoma roused the crowd. Speakers emphasized the necessity of doing everything short of outright violence or obviously breaches of law to expel the Chinese. Three weeks later on Halloween, the eve of the scheduled expulsion, Tacomans were joined at a final Alpha rally by a delegation of anti-Chinese activists from Seattle. The visitors from a city not known for its friendly relations with Tacoma congratulated their rival city on its move to free itself from both the Chinese workers and the railroad interests allied with Chinese labor. Two days later a mass of white Tacomans descended on Chinese residences throughout the city and forced nearly all those who had not already left to abandon their homes and property and march, under guard, out of town. After the events of Nov. 3rd, 1885, the 27 Tacomans charged by the federal government with illegally removing Chinese persons and property were taken to Vancouver for arraignment. Upon their return, these men were greeted at the train station with a parade that brought them to the Grand Army of the Republic Hall for a celebratory banquet, then on to the Alpha Opera House for a civic reception. At the Alpha, the events of the past month were institutionalized, presented as legitimate political acts upheld by the politest elements of Tacoma society. The Alpha retained its role in Tacoma politics and culture for several years after the events of November 1885. It hosted Tacoma’s celebration of Washington statehood in 1889. Its role in Tacoma's cultural and political life diminished when the more architecturally impressive Tacoma Theater was built one year later; the Alpha was torn down two years after that. The memory of Tacoma's anti-Chinese actions lasted far longer, however, than the building that gave those actions their most impressive stage.

Before the Bank of California building was erected at this location, the Alpha Opera House stood here. The Opera House was one of the more impressive spaces available for public events in New Tacoma, and from the early 1880s locals hosted receptions for visiting dignitaries as well as special events and political meetings inside.  Several well-attended 1885 discussions about driving Tacoma's Chinese residents out of the city took place at the Alpha, and periodic rallies there kept the anti-Chinese movement at a fever pitch through November of that year.  After the events of November 3rd, 27 prominent Tacomans were arraigned in Vancouver on charges of insurrection for the expulsion of the city's Chinese community; a reception celebrating their return to Tacoma was also held at the Alpha. 

Alpha Opera House, 1882-1892

The railroads that powered U.S. territorial and economic expansion during and after the Civil War drew heavily on Chinese workers, especially in the western states and territories. A handful of Chinese companies facilitated workers’ travel from China to the U.S. and managed the contracts between Chinese laborers and U.S. employers in the mid-19th Century. The Northern Pacific Railway Company, which had chosen Tacoma as its western terminus, was no exception. And because Chinese residents were largely prohibited from buying real estate in Tacoma proper, most Chinese residents leased or rented from the railroad. Prohibitions on Chinese land ownership and employment were features of 19th century western U.S. politics. By the 1880s, fears that the availability of Chinese workers would either drive down wages for white workers, be used to break worker strikes, or both, coalesced with anti-corporate activism of the period to produce strong anti-Chinese movements across California, Oregon, and the newly created Washington territory. Not hiring Chinese labor and prohibiting saloons were equally good railroad public relations campaigns by 1884. In that climate, a series of renegotiated treaties with China allowed the U.S. government to heavily restrict Chinese immigration to the U.S. for the purposes of finding work. Tacoma was a railroad town. But it had been built on the anticipation of the completed Northern Pacific railway, not the finished product. As national economic trends and local negotiations downshifted Tacoma’s prospects, many residents became frustrated with their dependence on the railroad’s influence. In Fall of 1883, construction began on a passenger train station, on the lower side of the tracks just below Seventeenth Street. Locals called it "Villard Depot," named after the newest president of the railroad company, Henry Villard, who Tacomans considered insufficiently attentive to Tacoma's growth. The station was significantly smaller than the one they had initially planned, but the smaller station suited the passenger traffic that could be expected in the near future. Villard employed 17,000 Chinese laborers in the completion of the Northern Pacific Line. When crews completed their work grading the wild terrain, laying railroad tracks, and constructing stations, however, railroad companies like Northern Pacific terminated those jobs. U.S. immigration policy restricted new entry for Chinese workers, but those already in the country could remain. These newly unemployed men found other forms of work on this side of the Pacific, including in Tacoma’s mills and the surrounding hop farms. They also started new businesses, first catering to the needs of their own community and then providing goods and services, most famously cheap laundries, to the general population. In 1885, Tacoma’s Chinese community was growing. Tied to the railroads by economic circumstance as well as public opinion, that growth was met with hostility by a significant and vocal segment of Tacoma’s population. On November 3rd of that year, a large group of men acting in concert with regional anti-Chinese activists evicted between 125 and 200 Chinese from their homes and businesses across Tacoma. This was all that remained of Tacoma’s Chinese community; many others had fled, boarding trains at the Villard passenger station in the preceding weeks as calls for their departure mounted across the region. The refugees’ final moments in Tacoma were spent marching down Pacific Avenue, past the home of the city’s Mayor and finally past Villard Depot. Instead of waiting there for the next train they were turned south towards Lake View, the first station beyond Tacoma’s borders. Arriving at Lake View station that evening well after dark, they crowded into the station and several nearby sheds. Those with money purchased tickets on the next morning's passenger train to Portland, OR; those without funds boarded a 3AM freight train going in the same direction that station agents flagged to stop for them. One week later, troops stationed in Seattle arrived in Tacoma, making camp near Villard Depot once they disembarked. They were there to guarantee the successful arrest of 27 Tacomans charged in federal court with violating U.S. law during the November 3rd expulsion of Chinese residents. Captain of Tacoma’s Home Guard Albert Whyte accompanied U.S. Marshal J.W. George to serve warrants on the men for insurrection against the U.S. government and hold them at the local courthouse until they could be put on a train to Vancouver, WA for arraignment. The next morning, a crowd of locals accompanied the Tacoma 27 to the passenger station. In Vancouver, a District Judge heard their pleas (not guilty), scheduled trial for early the following year, and set bail at $5,000 per man. Then he released them to return home. An exultant crowd met the men at Villard Depot and escorted them to a dinner and a reception celebrating their safe return. The station remained in use until it was moved across the street in 1892, then demolished nearly two decades later to make room for the much larger Union Station in 1909. Tacoma’s population had reconciled with its railroad dreams; it would take decades longer to reconcile with its anti-Chinese actions.

Chinese laborers helped build the railroads that brought people and goods to Tacoma and other towns in the western U.S. after the Civil War.  Chinese men and families built homes on property owned by the railroad when Tacoma landholders refused to sell them residences in town. When members of Tacoma's Chinese community, fearing anti-Chinese violence, began fleeing the city in the fall of 1885 some departed from the passenger train station, Villard depot, built in 1883.  Those that remained were forced from their homes the afternoon of November 3rd 1885, marched past Villard Depot to a station outside the city boundaries, and put on trains to Oregon.

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Tacoma Labor History Landmark Tour

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