Tacoma's Formerly Dirty Turkish Bathhouse
Never know what you're gonna find when you climb down a manhole. It could be your average sewer, or... well, this guy found a huge, once-luxurious, 120-year-old Turkish bathhouse hidden under downtown Tacoma. The kicker is that the property was at times owned by famous vice lords Peter Sandberg (7th paragraph down on this page) and Vito Cuttone (11th paragraph down). How fantastic, in the traditional sense of the word! Really, who woulda thunk? It seems ripe for some sort of historical romance novel about a prostitute, her pimp, and the logger who loves them both.
The plan is to turn the bathhouse into a cistern that will hold rainwater and the runoff from the building's green roof, which seems practical enough (Oh, how the architectural design magazines will swoon), but not nearly as romantic a use as we would hope for. No, we want to see the old bathhouse turned into a bar--a gin joint, maybe, just to work the Casablanca angle. Or it could be a restaurant. Scratch that: ClaimJumper would want the space and it's only in quantity that their food's flirting with danger.
Why not open it up to the public before you fill it with water, Tacoma? At the very least, send in a dashing young photographer who has an imagination and a coffee-table book deal. The story's too enticing to flood just yet. Might the current master of organized crime and prostitution in Tac-town want to renovate the bathhouse, given the chance? We asked our friend "T-bag" (his choice of an alias, names changed to protect the guilty) who the current vice lord of Tacoma is, and he whispered, "Tupac Shakur. He's not dead."
