The Opening of the Prairie Line Trail on the UWT Campus

Yesterday marked the opening of the Prairie Line Trail on the campus of the University of Washington Tacoma.  Congressman Derek Kilmer, Regent Herb Simon, Interim Chancellor Kenyon Chan and many other members of Tacoma and the South Puget Sound community were on hand.

The UWT campus has always been a beautiful one, with its own distinctive character.  The buildings are a mixture of old and new, with the oldest of them the beneficiaries of a historic preservation.  The old warehouses of the terminus of the transcontinental railroad once housed buildings such as Birmingham Block and West Coast Grocery.  Now they house classes and faculty offices for a multitude of academic programs.  You can earn your Computer Engineering degree while sitting in Birmingham Hay and Seed.
 

With designs from landscape architects PLACE Studio, LLC, the project has transformed the 80ft wide rail corridor through campus into a vibrant new open space.  In the earlier part of the day, when the fence first came down and the sun was shining, I took this picture with my phone.

The trail itself carries on the campus tradition of historical preservation and introduces sustainability and ecological urban design as well.  The original tracks that carried the railway engines down to the waterfront remain.  Where Abraham Lincoln once participated in a ribbon cutting, another ribbon cutting took place over one hundred and twenty years later.