Senator Rosa Franklin Park (1201 S Puget Sound Avenue) was once home to Franklin Lake. Better known as “Hoodlum Lake,” it was one of Tacoma’s best wintertime ice skating spots.
The former lake was nestled among gently rolling hills near the Franklin School (now Franklin Elementary School). Elliott Metcalf, writing for the Daily Ledger newspaper on January 1, 1926, described how the lake earned its unusual name in the late 1800s “because the youngsters who gathered there to swim and frolic were tagged as ‘hoodlums’ by the straight-laced of those days.”
The lake was a favorite spot for swimming, fishing, and picnicking. Kids would light bonfires on the beach and swim out to the small island. Her three brothers had learned to swim in Hoodlum Lake, Mrs. Ludwig Jones wrote to the News Tribune on October 22, 1946. She fondly remembered the “natural shrubs and secret paths where we girls picked enormous wild violets to take to our teachers at the Franklin school. Wild strawberries also grew on its banks.”
Ice Skating at Hoodlum Lake
Lakes rarely freeze during our region’s typically mild and wet winters. But since it was small and shallow, Hoodlum Lake froze quickly, making it one of the best ice-skating spots in the Tacoma area.
When temperatures dropped, local kids knew they would have only a few days of skating and coasting before the ice started to melt. For many years, it was only thick enough for younger (and lighter) children to play on the ice. The kids went at their own risk, and officials’ attempts to keep them off dangerous ice often proved futile. Skaters sometimes fell through thin ice.
The winter of 1924-1925 proved an outstanding year for ice skating. The lake froze as temperatures plummeted to six degrees a few days before Christmas. The ice had some “hickory bends”— soft ice that bends when stepped on but doesn’t break—at first, but small kids could still skate safely. Hard overnight freezes solved the problem. Still, a few days after the coldest Christmas on record—measuring only 15 degrees atop the Fidelity Building downtown—skaters had cut up the ice so badly that ice skating became impossible.
Hoodlum Lake Becomes Franklin Lake
Times changed. Trees and brush around the lake were cleared, and houses were built. The lake began shrinking. Residents decided that it needed to be protected. In 1908, locals formed the Twelfth Street Improvement Club to create a park around the lake.
The following year, parks commissioner and former Tacoma mayor William W. Seymour—of W. W. Seymour Conservatory fame—helped by donating two lots of land near the lake to the Franklin School for the study of plants. The same year, the Improvement Club petitioned the City Council to rename Hoodlum Lake “Franklin Lake” after the nearby Franklin School and to create a park around it.
The West End lacked parks, and “This little sheet of water,” the Daily Ledger argued on March 11, 1909, “is about 3 acres in extent in dry weather and four or five times as large in winter. It has a natural outlet so that drainage can be obtained, and the contour of the land is such as to form a very pretty park.”
Supporters did not get a park, but they did get the official name change. Most people, however, continued to call it Hoodlum Lake.
Creating Franklin Park
Supporters hadn’t given up on creating Franklin Park. In 1911, the Board of Parks Commissioners recommended purchasing land for a park, but took no action. In the mid-1920s, residents convinced the city to reroute a stormwater drain away from the lake to reduce pollution. Local volunteers even drained the lake to clear out trash.
That was just the start. In 1929, park supporters formed the West End Park and Playground Association to raise funds to purchase private land for the lakeside park.
Donations slowed during the Great Depression, and the Association could not make mortgage payments. The project stalled. But supporters did not give up. Hoping to secure federal WPA funding, they successfully relaunched fundraising efforts in the mid-1930s.
Franklin Park officially opened in 1941.
Improving Ice Skating at Hoodlum Lake
As adults worked on creating and improving the park, kids kept right on skating. City officials tried to improve conditions by having the fire department spray frozen lakes and ponds with its hoses to create a better skating surface. In other parks, public tennis courts were flooded and allowed to freeze as a safer alternative for skaters.
Even when the ice was too thin for skating, kids tried. Neighbors could sometimes hear it cracking under them. In 1956, a ten-year-old boy fell through the ice. By the time first responders arrived, he had been rescued and was warming up in the home of the “Mother of Hoodlum Lake,” Eva Potter. A longtime neighbor, she had helped spearhead the park’s creation.
Goodbye, Hoodlum Lake
It was incidents like this that convinced people that the lake was a year-round public health and safety hazard. Calls to remove the lake began in the 1940s, but it wasn’t until a neighbor’s formal complaint in 1969 that the city started the years-long process of filling in the lake. Residents were heartbroken.
Franklin Park was renamed Senator Rosa Franklin Park in 2021. Today, the place remains a community gathering place, as it once was for past generations of Tacoma children who learned to swim and ice skate at Hoodlum Lake.