Tacoma has well been called the “City of Destiny,” for never in the history of our great republic has the finger of destiny so unerringly pointed to the location of a large commercial and manufacturing metropolis as it did to the shores of Commencement bay when the Northern Pacific located here the terminus of its main line on Puget sound. In its history, years have witnessed more life and growth, more progress in business and wealth and the creation of more permanent values of property, than decades in the history of older and admittedly prosperous cities of the eastern states. Eight years ago, at the beginning of the present decade, Tacoma had a population of but seven hundred and twenty souls, its streets were ungraded and full of stumps, and its business blocks were few and of but the cheapest of frame structures. What mighty things have been wrought in the brief time which has since elapsed! Now it has many miles of graded streets, of water and gas mains, of telegraph, telephone and electric light wires and street railways, solid blocks of brick and stone business structures, large and commodious opera house, public schools, seminaries and academies, elegant hotels, large factories, great and expanding docks, warehouses and shipping facilities, a taxable property of $6,555,400 and a population of twenty thousand souls. It is this Tacoma of to-day, bustling, vigorous, full of life and business, and advancing with prodigious strides, which is treated of in the following pages of engravings and descriptive matter. These engravings, elegant and artistic as they are, fall far short of doing justice to a city whose prosperity, vitality and progressiveness it is impossible to convey to paper. They are the Tacoma of to-day, but will be almost as unlike the great city ten years from now which will bear that name, as they are unlike that city of board shanties which occupied this site eight years ago.