Telling a Friend History of Hometown

 I have been seeing a gentleman named Les who is a member of my church for the last couple years. He is about thirteen years older than me and he has lived in the Gig Harbor for the past fifteen years. His wife has been a longtime resident of the area like me however he has been asking questions about Gig Harbor when I was younger whenever we see each other in a local coffee shop. In fact last week I saw him four days in a row.

Coming up next month on July 15 will be the 10^th anniversary of the opening of the second Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The original bridge opened July 1, 1940 however it collapsed on November 7, 1940. The bridge was known as Galloping Gertie. The replacement bridge opened almost ten years later in 1950. For the residents they had to take a ferry if they wanted to go back and forth between Gig Harbor and Tacoma. It was the same way before the original bridge was built. My dad used to tell us all about traveling between Gig Harbor and Tacoma. Actually he moved back to Tacoma after the original bridge went down. In fact he went over the bridge that same day.

The reason the second bridge was built the traffic between Tacoma and Gig Harbor was getting very bad. There were times that it took me an hour or longer to get home from work. People living in Port Orchard, Bremerton and the Key Peninsula went over the bridge as well.

Since the second bridge has been built the traffic has been great with very little heavy traffic. Only time traffic is heavy is when there is an accident which doesn’t happen too often. Also there is a toll on the new bridge going from Gig Harbor to Tacoma. The toll is expected to be on the bridge until 2030 depending on when it is paid off. The law in the state of Washington you can’t have tolls on bridges that are already paid for.

Since the second bridge has been built the population of the area has more than doubled in these ten years. There has been another shopping center built along highway 16 called Uptown with a movie theatre and several shops. The shopping next to that was there before the second bridge has been expanded and another shopping center is being built right now and it will be completed by the end of the year.

North of Gig Harbor is another shopping center along with a hospital and multiple housing. Currently they are building a lot of new homes in that area. The big question right now is how to deal with the traffic in that area. They have round abouts right now without light signals. The round abouts will be harder to deal with more traffic.

Anyway Gig Harbor is three to four times larger than when I was growing up especially the growth in the last ten years. We had one stop light back in those days with one shopping center downtown and another one off of the highway. Also there were no overpasses like there is now. The whole area was more laid back in those days.  Shopping for clothes you had to go into Tacoma to do so.

It is nice to talk to someone about the days more than twenty years ago. I am sure most people have memories of where they grew up and how different it was more than twenty years ago. It will be interesting to see how things look in the next ten years. I just hope that Gig Harbor still has that small town feel to it.