A city needs to form and transform to endure, and often this can be a difficult affair. Oftentimes a town is settled for one selected motive and then, years later, finds it needs to learn a new trick in order to stand viable, which is inevitable. However the way a city changes is a thing well worth paying awareness to, because it says a lot about the changes in our society at large.
Hoquiam, Washington is an interesting instance of these changes. Constituted as a logging city, it maintains that history with events such as the Loggers’ Playday. And in the fall there is a logging contest and a parade to further remind the public how they got here. However where some traditions are dateless, rudimentary to the framework of a city’s culture, others have to be created afresh.
Hoquiam’s Chance for Change
Pay attention to the Hoquiam waterfront. The stretch of river in Hoquiam’s downtown hasn’t been often used since the 1980s. But now that there’s talk of evolution in that space, there’s also the possibility for it to become a shaping constituent of the local culture. Hoquiam’s got to have something beyond just logging and lumber, you know.
There’s room on the waterfront for hotels and shops, the nature of commerce that makes a town a city — or at least a bigger town. Developing the waterfront district has done distinguished things for cities such as San Antonio and Baltimore. For those towns, similar to Hoquiam, this locale becomes a conventional place to congregate, to frame in shops and dining opportunities. And of course at hand is a real feature that serves as built-in scenery, something to take a seat while sipping drinks or having a bit of dinner.
A Future by the Water
Another consideration worth a moment is Hoquiam’s relationship to Aberdeen, the larger city to the east. This relationship, like probably all neighboring towns, is one of friendly rivalry. And rivalry often does good things for innovation. Hoquiam is at the mouth of the river, right on Grays Harbor, so it has opportunities no other town in the area does.
But Hoquiam must proceed cautiously. It is interested in preserving its past, as is evident in the 2009 revitalization of its train depot. So it knows how to preserve and honor its past; now it must seriously consider how it wants to carry that history forward, what kind of city it wants to become.
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