Legacy
Perhaps dogged by being driven out of Seattle due to creating noxious and unsanitary conditions, Carstens appears to have been very concerned with broadcasting the advanced technology and pristine conditions of his facilities, despite clear evidence to the contrary. One of the best glimpses inside the facility that we have is a 1909 “Christmas Booklet”.39 While the recipients of this grisly holiday present are unknown, affectless workers can be seen in dim, expansive wooden caverns in the second floor glue factory and wearing long, wet leather aprons in the Inedible Tank Rendering Room.
✺
Perhaps the most effective piece of marketing that Carstens created and likely what most Tacoma residents would associate with them over the physical presence on the Tideflats was their annual participation in the Daffodil parade, where men in butcher’s whites wielded comically oversized carving knives in front of huge, paper mache hams on floats covered in daffodils and frilled trim.40
✺
Despite Carstens’ protests, the facility affected much more than the “perfume” of the Tideflats, as he put it.41 The company town gradually changed into a community known as the Hollywood-on-the-Tideflats, a cruel, ironic name for people forced to live in simple houseboats and shacks due to the great depression. In one of the more blatant displays of WWII opportunism, the Tacoma Fire Department collaborated with the US Coast Guard to evict and burn the property of the entire community, just two days after the forced removal of Tacoma’s Japanese American community.42
In 1987, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the area a superfund site, identifying carcinogenic levels of heavy metals and organic compounds. Waste materials in soil composition samples ranged from coal tar, cyanide, shredded car interiors, animal fat and animal byproducts. A combination of soil excavation, stabilization and groundwater extraction was recommended for areas exceeding the 6 to 10 lifetime span cancer risk designation.43 This survey was completed only 17 years before the establishment of the Detention Center.
The law HB 1090, which passed in 2021, effectively banned private prisons in Washington State and would have forced the closure of the Northwest Detention Center when its contract ended with ICE in 2025. This law was subsequently disarmed by a ruling that state law cannot interfere with federal government powers and their contracts with the Florida based Geo Group, leaving the Center open for the foreseeable future.44
✺
Conclusion
While there are overlapping themes of immigration, captivity and labor abuse that connect the Carstens Packing Company and the Northwest Detention Center, an invisible factor is distance. Both institutions required a location close enough to the city to take advantage of its tax incentives, unorganized labor and access to centralized trade routes, while being far enough from view to keep residents forgetful of their obvious environmental and ethical impacts. Both understood the power of inserting themselves in a developing area, somewhat removed from public scrutiny.
The psychology of physical remove in the built environment acts a bit like a dumbwaiter, which allows goods to be pulled up from the basements and kitchens to the dining rooms and bedrooms of usually upper class, residential homes. The simple contraption allowed the owner to consume without seeing the human cost of the product they were delivered, and recognize their complicity in any abuses that made those resources possible. This is the difference between knowing something exists in concept and comprehending these places in person, thereby understanding your relationship to it.
About the Author
Andrew Weymouth is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at University of Idaho, primarily focusing on static web design to curate the institution’s special collections and partner with faculty and graduate students on fellowship projects. He has also created digital scholarship projects for the universities of Oregon, Washington and the Tacoma Northwest Room archives, ranging from long form audio public history to architectural databases and network visualizations. He writes about labor, architecture, underrepresented communities and using digital scholarship methods to survey equity in archival collections.