McMenamins Chosen to Take Over Tacoma City Hall

Take that, Portland City Hall coffeeshop!

By Matthew Korfhage

Add one more to our list of suggested slogans for the city of Tacoma: "Tacoma: Our City Hall is a brewpub!"

Or, if you prefer, you can change the slogan of our biggest local brewpub chain: "McMenamins: We're even in Tacoma now!"

The Tacoma city council just anointed the Portland McBrothers as the preferred new developers of Tacoma's Old City Hall, alongside an already in-progress renovation of the adjacent 100-year-old Elks Temple, the Tacoma News-Tribune reported Monday, essentially making for a beer resort smack in the middle of Tacoma.

The defunct city hall had apparently been decaying slowly until the city bought the historic building this June, which it is now looking to sell off to the beer chain best known for taking over old, beautiful buildings and then serving beer and Communication Breakdown burgers in them.

Despite other bidders who promised earlier project completion, Tacoma officials cited McMenamins' strong track record restoring historic buildings, including 18 properties on the National Register of Historic Places.

"In the Elks, we've crammed in rooms wherever we could," Mike McMenamin told the News-Tribune. That's "fun because the Elks is just a complete jumble of craziness, but some of the spaces were hard to deal with. I'm torn between whether that makes it great or a little awkward..We can ease some of that with Old City Hall. Old City Hall is an absolute classic."

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