Looking Back’s theme for 2026 is Downtown by the Decades. From the 1930s to late 1970s, the Port of Olympia hosted an array of large tanks to store oil offloaded from ships. The tanks were finally removed in the early 1980s. The structure in front of the tanks in this image from about 1979 is currently the home of Olympia Seafood on Columbia Street. Image selected and captioned by Deborah Ross on behalf of the Olympia Historical Society and Bigelow House Museum, https://olympiahistory.org.
Olympia Planning Commission archives, Washington State Archives