The Parkway Tavern is all about history, and some of it is my own history
A long, long time ago, my parents moved to Tacoma as newlyweds. At one point, before I was born, they lived near the Parkway Tavern, which is about to celebrate its 90th birthday on Saturday, July 26th.
Before she passed, I had many opportunities to talk to my mom about my family’s history in Tacoma. (I was the youngest of five children born in Tacoma.) These conversations included questions about where she and my dad liked to hang out. As she explained, women in those days (the late 1940s through the mid-1960s) didn’t get out much: they were generally sequestered at home, mothering the spawn of the baby boom. A fact of life in those days. On the other hand, that didn’t stop my dad from having some favorite, nearby watering holes.
I asked her about the Parkway Tavern, explained its location, and wondered if it was one of my dad’s haunts. She did not remember a bar by that name, but explained that a small corner store nearby had beer on tap. My mom called it the neighborhood grocery store and bar, describing it as a tavern on one side and a market on the other. It’s one of the places my dad hung out in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That’s my connection to the Parkway Tavern’s history.
She didn’t know it, but my mom described, apparently in perfect detail, a place called Rawlings Market, which opened in 1935 and was renamed Parkway Tavern sometime in the 1950s. I am not exactly sure when it stopped being a corner store that served beer and began focusing entirely on being a tavern. A lot of the Parkway’s story is tribal knowledge: oral history that is disappearing with its keepers, like my mother.
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Fragments of the Parkway Tavern’s history are preserved in pictures and newspaper clippings on the tavern’s walls. Much of it is soaked into the floorboards. Along with hundreds of tap handles, the rafters are haunted with memories of joyful celebrations, sorrowful remembrances, first kisses, painful breakups, jokes, lies, fights, hugs, victories, defeats, laughter, and tears. Reverberating across the decades, when I’m there, I hear echoes of the past—my past. I imagine my mom sending my dad to the market for a quart of milk and a dozen eggs. Rawlings Market, a.k.a. the Parkway Tavern, made it easy for him to comply.
On Saturday, July 26th, the Parkway Tavern celebrates 90 years. The party goes all day, from 11 a.m. until closing time. Around back, in the beer garden, the music starts at 1 p.m. Keep an eye on the event’s Facebook page for updates, including the band lineup. There is something for everyone: beer, cocktails, live music, DJs, and new Parkway gear to commemorate the milestone and the event.
Visit our events page and calendar to learn about all sorts of other upcoming beer events. To submit an event for inclusion on our events calendar, use our event submission form. Got more details to share, reach out to us.
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