Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainDowntown Tacoma's former police station and jail, tied to axe murderer Jake Bird's 'hex'
610 Pacific Ave, Tacoma, WA 98402
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Exterior is freely viewable from Pacific Avenue, beside Old City Hall. The Pacific Brewing & Malting taproom that operated here closed in 2019; the building's current interior use varies.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved downtown Tacoma sidewalk beside Old City Hall
Equipment
Photos OK
Former Tacoma Police Station and Jail · Jake Bird Case · Downtown Tacoma History
The structure at 610 Pacific Avenue sits next to Tacoma's Old City Hall and once held the downtown police station and city jail, with the two buildings connected by a jail cell. That function places it in the story of one of Tacoma's most notorious criminal cases.
On October 30, 1947, Jake Bird broke into the Tacoma home of Bertha Kludt and her 17-year-old daughter Beverly June Kludt and killed both with an axe. Officers responding to screams caught Bird as he fled, and he confessed at the Tacoma City Jail. After his November 1947 conviction, Bird declared that everyone connected to the case would die before he did. In the following year several trial participants died, a sequence that became locally known as the 'Jake Bird Hex.' Bird was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary on July 15, 1949.
Pacific Brewing & Malting Co. was a historic Tacoma brand that first opened in 1897 and closed during Prohibition in 1916. The name was revived in 2014, and the brewery operated a taproom in this former police-station building beside Old City Hall. The downtown taproom closed in 2019 and brewing operations ended soon after. The building remains standing downtown; the dark history attached to it is that of the former jail, not of the brewery.
Sources
The haunting reputation of 610 Pacific Avenue is built almost entirely on its past as Tacoma's police station and jail and on the figure of Jake Bird. Bird confessed to the 1947 axe killings of Bertha Kludt and her daughter Beverly, claimed responsibility for many more deaths, and at his sentencing told the men who arrested and tried him that they would die before he did.
Within a year, several people connected to the case did die, and Tacoma newspapers and local storytellers came to call it the 'Jake Bird Hex.' Bird was executed in 1949. Because the building beside Old City Hall held the jail where he and other prisoners were confined, local lore holds that he remains there.
The more colorful taproom-era stories about moving kegs and shadow figures circulated while Pacific Brewing operated in the building, but they are not documented beyond local retelling, and the taproom has since closed. What is well recorded is the Bird case itself — the murders, the confession, the 'hex,' and the 1949 execution — which is why the site endures on Tacoma's true-crime and ghost-walk routes.
Notable Entities
The building at 610 Pacific Avenue stands beside Tacoma's Old City Hall and once held the downtown police station and jail. From 2014 to 2019 it housed the revived Pacific Brewing & Malting Co. taproom, now closed. The exterior and its place in downtown Tacoma's true-crime history can be viewed from the street; it is also covered on local ghost walks.
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