BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 8/28/2026
Hosmer Street has a legacy, but it might not be quite what you expect.
Throughout the years, the neighborhood has been a point of pride in the city, featuring luxury hotels, apartment buildings, and the biggest movie theater in the city.
Today there are still many hotels in the area, but much of that chapter could easily be forgotten. Some beloved businesses were lost to arson and never reopened.
In 1965, the Sherwood Inn at 8402 S. Hosmer St. advertised its grand opening on August 18, describing the new location as “the most luxuriously furnished Motor Hotel in the NW” in the Tacoma News Tribune (TNT).
The two banquet rooms were described in another TNT article as the “best facilities of that kind in the city.” Guild Hall A featured “floor length drapes and large candelabra chandeliers” and had capacity for 450 people.
The new hotel had a barbershop and beauty shop on-site and advertised the “largest heated swimming pool in any motor hotel in the Northwest.”
Today the location continues the hotel tradition and still features unique offerings, like the Secret Burger Kitchen and recently opened glow golf. In recent years, the hotel was also the home of Nate Jackson’s Super Funny Comedy Club, which has since moved to another location in downtown Tacoma.
Later the same year, the Camelot apartments opened in October and also boasted of their luxury amenities, and the apartment building had apparently been awarded “Tacoma City Light’s gold medallion for excellence in electrical living,” according to reporting by TNT at the time.
That land is still home to apartment buildings, and while still full of modern amenities, luxury might not be the first choice to describe them.
Down the street, the Tacoma South movie theater was once one of the premier movie theaters in the city.
That theater opened in 1983, and at one point, Auditorium 1 had “the best sound system in the city and included 70mm capabilities,” according to research shared by Dan Kaiser. The owners didn’t make many upgrades to keep up with new technology, and it closed in 2002 after the Lakewood Cinema megaplex opened across I-5 from the once-lauded theater.
Today, a Floor & Decor has replaced the former movie theater. For a long time, you could still experience the theater’s seats after 250 of them were donated to Blue Mouse Theatre.
Arson in Hosmer
The many lives of 8620 S. Hosmer St. give just one example of the neighborhood’s wide-ranging history throughout the area.
Construction first began for the Raintree Restaurant and Lounge at that address in 1975. The restaurant was a popular place for many years until it was destroyed by arson in 1993.
While the motive for this arson isn’t mentioned in the news archives accessed by Weekly Volcano, three years earlier the restaurant was almost bombed by white supremacists, and the Tacoma News Tribune documented a pattern of harassment.
An article published in 1990 details how the white supremacists were arrested before they were able to complete a terror attack focused on “several black bars in Tacoma,” including Raintree and “several Korean businesses located on South Tacoma Way,” as well as a Jewish synagogue and the LGBTQ club Neighbors in Seattle.
The white supremacists who were arrested for the bombing plot were part of the Aryan Nations based in Hayden Lake, Idaho. They also referred to their white supremacist organization under the name “Church of Jesus Christ Christian.”
Prosecutors at the time confirmed that the restaurant was targeted because of the Black clientele.
Lyle Quasim of the Tacoma-Pierce County Black Collective and Safe Streets described the threats as “no surprise” in the 1990 article. “From the people who I communicate with in the black community, it is in some ways not even remarkable,” Quasim is quoted as saying in the article. “It’s kind of what we know through daily experience.”
In 1999, a three-story hotel was under construction to take the place of the former Raintree but was also destroyed by an arsonist.
The fire was so hot it melted the Denny’s freeway sign and cracked windows at that restaurant and the Rothem Inn and Howard Johnson Express Inn next door. The hotel’s construction was ultimately completed, and it became a Comfort Inn.
Today, the building is serving a new need in the community as a permanent supportive housing location called Aspen Court.
Another location nearby also went through a similar history of repeated arson incidents.
Down the street, in the 8200 block of South Hosmer Street, the Turkey Inn opened in 1971 and served families for about two decades, as a 2023 article in South Sound Talk recalls.
The China Town restaurant took Turkey Inn’s place, was damaged by arsonists, then became the Great Wall Buffet, which was also targeted by arsonists and was destroyed in 2019. Today the location is a self-storage business.
There are many forces that cause change in neighborhoods, but this pattern of targeted arson on businesses either owned or frequented by BIPOC communities starts an important conversation about the larger pattern of small- and large-scale attacks against minorities that highlight both oppression and resilience.
The threats and arson that took down the Raintree for being a home to the Black community bring to mind an endless list of similar incidents, from intimidation and harassment to large-scale assaults like the bombing of Black Wall Street.
The repeated attacks on back-to-back Chinese restaurants in Hosmer can’t be separated from the brutal expulsion of all Chinese residents from Tacoma in the late 1800s. We didn’t find specific confirmation of the motives of these arson incidents in the news clippings of the day, but the context of this history can’t be ignored.
Hosmer Street’s namesake, Theodore Hosmer, was a vital part of completing the final stretch of the Northern Pacific Railroad, but the actual railroad itself was predominantly built by Chinese immigrants, who were then pushed out of the city and onto those very trains.
Today, many of the new uses of these past places meet community needs in new ways, but it’s worth noting that these new uses don’t bring the community together in the same way.
Self-storage serves a very different need than a beloved restaurant; safe and supportive housing meets a vital need but doesn’t bring people together the way the Raintree once did; and a shopping trip to Floor & Decor is just not the same Saturday night experience as a trip to the movies.
This is not to say there are no community spaces in today’s Hosmer. The community is still full of local small-business owners from diverse backgrounds and residents from all over the world.
Kamlai Thai’s spacious dining space and authentic flavors offer space to connect. Faded Stylez barbershop offers community and fresh cuts in the way only a barbershop can, and, of course, Latitude 84 brings together regulars and first-time visitors from all walks of life.
Even the Fiat Laundry is now a place where people can spend time and feel safe to get to know their neighbors while they wait for their load of laundry to complete its cycle, thanks to new ownership that has transformed the place.
Next time you visit Hosmer, you’ll now have a little more insight into its hidden history, and maybe this legacy of luxury and iconic destinations for people to gather will add inspiration for future plans in the area.
Special thanks to James Peterson at the Northwest Room, Special Collections, in the Tacoma Public Library for going above and beyond to help us access historic newspaper clippings in our research for this article.
