Paul Gingrich calls his years as consulting architect for Tacoma General Hospital some of the best of his professional career. “An architect’s dream,” he says.

For 18 of his 25 years as an architect with Lea, Pearson and Richards, he was heavily involved in helping the hospital fulfill its mission and grow with the community.

He was even neutral on last year’s controversy over the hospital’s demolition of 90-year-old First United Methodist Church for an emergency-room expansion.

“We never dreamed the church would not be there until the end of the world, but times change,” he said.

He explains all this because Gingrich, 81, doesn’t want his decision to fight the hospital’s latest construction plan to be taken the wrong way.

“I consider myself a friend of MultiCare,” he says. “But my concern is that whatever is done there be done correctly.”

To that end, he opposes plans to build a four-story boiler plant – topped by nine-story venting stacks – across the street from Wright Park. Despite attempts to dress up the steam-making and emergency power generation facility with reflective glass and stainless steel stacks, the plant would still be an industrial use facing a much-loved urban park.

“I was really enraged,” Gingrich said. “There they were putting a boiler plant across from the park, exposing their back side to the park.” He called it “absolutely unacceptable.”

He is not alone. Community groups are starting to take notice, and Metropolitan Park District commissioner Ryan Mello has written a letter to the city objecting to the plan.

“By placing this almost one-city-block industrial, energy producing structure across from one of Tacoma’s jewels of open space … we will be placing ‘dead space’ and removing valuable eyes, legs and vital life across from this beautiful urban park,” he wrote.

The park district is getting ready to redevelop the park thanks to a voter-approved bond issue and private donations. Part of the $6.5 million project is to open up the park’s interior and move some of the more active uses – the children’s water park and the basketball courts – to the edge along I Street. That would place them in direct view of the proposed boiler plant.

Mello said he wonders why MultiCare can’t build the plant somewhere else on its campus. In a question-and-answer document prepared by MultiCare staff, the hospital asserts it has little property available that isn’t in use.

“It is also located near utilities and other infrastructure that supports our current steam facility,” MultiCare states.

But Gingrich, who helped develop many of the current uses of the hospital, said he knows of at least six sites that would work, including the basement of the new building that is planned for the First United Methodist Church site or the lot across Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

“They could put it in the middle of that site and surround it with a parking garage. No one would see it,” he said.

While still doing work for the hospital, Gingrich even drew up plans to place boiler facilities beneath J Street. He can point it out on massive blueprints he helped prepare.

MultiCare has applied for permits from the City of Tacoma, including a design variance regarding the amount of windows buildings must have. And it needs a state environmental policy act review. But those are all administrative acts, outside the reach of political pressure.

Still, Gingrich hopes public pressure will cause the health care institution to rethink its plans, to reconsider the effect it would have on the neighborhood and Wright Park, and to reconnect with its community.

“No matter how unobtrusive, it is not the right thing to be there. Because there are other places to put it, that’s where it should go,” he said. “When the public knows how MultiCare is riding roughshod over everyone, I think we can stop it.”

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com