Lost Tacoma

I started thinking about the Detention Center because of a digital archiving project I was working on called Lost Tacoma, in partnership with the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room. [Three of the buildings in the collection were designed for the Carstens Packing Company, the largest wholesale meat warehouse on the west coast for many years, established on the Tideflats in 1904. Plans included a “pork house,” a cooler and an abattoir designed by premiere industrial Chicago architects Henschien, Everds and Crombie, who would go on to create facilities for cold cut luminaries Oscar Meyer.

I was drawn to the blueprints by their detailed room labels, evocative regardless of your dietary preferences. Technical drawings illustrate the proximity of the lard melting room to the inedible rendering room, and the condemned products room to what was simply labeled the hair department. As I was identifying mapping coordinates for each of the 28 locations, I realized the detention center occupied the exact same space as the Carstens Packing Company, and that they opened exactly 100 years after one another.

Though Thomas Carstens and Geo Group have no economic or genealogical ties to one another, their motivations for occupying this same space in the built environment are similar. Both corporations knew that they wanted to profit off of something that was environmentally and ethically questionable and they wanted to be at just enough of a remove that they could be out of sight and out of mind to the resident’s of the urban center, while benefiting from transportation centrality and proximity to unorganized labor. Both corporations engaged in the psychology of distance and spatial perception, asking:

How far away can you be from a city’s residents so you are almost never considered, while still close enough to impact them environmentally or psychologically on a daily basis?