A Center of Transportation
Twenty-five years ago this week, on October 16, 1999, Seattle celebrated the reopening of Union Station as the new headquarters of Sound Transit. The historic building, which was dedicated with great fanfare almost a century before, had just undergone a year-long renovation that cost $21 million.
The Oregon and Washington Station (later renamed Union Station) opened on May 20, 1911, and was Seattle's second transcontinental railroad terminal. Located just east of the recently-built King Street Station, the new depot helped solidify the city’s status as a West Coast terminus. Cross-country service from the station began a week later and lasted just shy of 60 years.
During that time, Union Station welcomed countless passengers aboard the Union Pacific and Milwaukee Road lines. After it closed, the building's vast waiting room was used for special events, but the edifice mostly sat dormant. By century's end, it got a new lease on life.
In 1996, King, Pierce and Snohomish county voters approved the creation of Sound Transit to operate light rail, commuter rail, and express buses. The new agency agreed to locate its executive offices in Union Station, which was lovingly restored to its former glory. In 2017, the building's great hall – which recently reopened after having been closed to the public due to the Covid-19 pandemic – was renamed in honor of Joni Earl.
A Leader in Education
We were saddened this week by the death of Dr. Maxine Mimms, a long-time educator and activist who founded Evergreen State College’s Tacoma campus and the Maxine Mimms Academies. Dr. Mimms spent most of her life dedicated to helping under-represented students achieve greatness through education.
When Mimms was a child, her mother taught neighborhood children to read at their kitchen table. Mimms later moved to the Pacific Northwest, where she found work as an elementary school teacher and later became the director of in-service training for Seattle Public Schools. In 1972, after a stint in the U.S. Department of Labor, she began teaching at Evergreen State College in Olympia, commuting from her home in the traditionally black Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma
She soon realized that the campus was relatively inaccessible for students in her neighborhood, so she invited her colleague and neighbor Dr. Elizabeth (Betsy) Diffendal, a white anthropology professor at Evergreen, to start a Tacoma program off the books. Classes were held around Mimms's kitchen table – just like her mother had done – for 10 years, until The Evergreen State College's Tacoma Program officially opened in 1983. After retiring from Evergreen, Mimms created the Maxine Mimms Academies to provide support for children who had been suspended or expelled from public school.
