LeMay — America's Car Museum

Harold LeMay was a Tacoma garbage collector who, over the course of five decades, assembled what the Guinness Book of World Records certified as the world's largest private automobile collection — approximately 3,000 vehicles by the time of his death in 2000. His wife Nancy continued the work. The collection occupied their Spanaway property south of Tacoma and required more management infrastructure than most small municipalities. It was, by any measure, one of the stranger and more remarkable private collections in American history.

LeMay — America's Car Museum, which opened in 2012 on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound, is the institutional expression of that collection's democratizing impulse. The building, designed by LARGE Architecture, unfolds over four floors and 165,000 square feet, with rotating galleries that address different chapters of American automotive culture. The collection draws on LeMay family vehicles supplemented by loans, donations, and focused acquisitions. Approximately 350 vehicles are displayed at any given time.

The Pacific Northwest is not typically considered automotive country in the way that Detroit or Los Angeles is. The museum makes a persuasive case that this is a misconception. The region's specific relationship with the automobile — influenced by terrain, weather, the logging and fishing industries, and the particular culture of the American West — gives the museum's narrative a regional texture that distinguishes it from Midwestern and Southern collections. The view of Commencement Bay from the upper floors is a bonus.