On May 16, 2026, Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital welcomed its first patients into a building of its own — a six-story, 262,114-square-foot hospital at 305 South L Street in Tacoma, across the street from MultiCare Tacoma General and on the site of the original Mary Bridge campus that opened in 1955. Becker’s Hospital Review prices the project at $479 million; the Puget Sound Business Journal’s final tally, reported by KIRO 7, is $480 million. Either way, it is the building Mary Bridge has been waiting nearly forty years to come home to.
Because until this spring, Mary Bridge was a hospital inside a hospital. It opened as a standalone children’s hospital in 1955, funded by the estate of Tacoma family-medicine physician Albert Bridge. In 1987, needing room, it moved into a wing of Tacoma General — and stayed for nearly four decades, sharing space and resources with an adult hospital whose building it did not control.
A project that had to be redesigned before it could be built
The road back to a building of its own was not straight. The project was announced in 2020 with an original estimate of $344 million. Pandemic-era supply chains broke that number, and in August 2022 MultiCare published redesigned plans: a $415 million project, the inpatient tower trimmed from 300,000 to 250,000 square feet, the ambulatory building split into its own phase, parking cut from 1,100 stalls to 800. Construction broke ground in spring 2023. The final building opened at roughly $480 million — a cost arc that will be familiar to any facilities leader who carried a capital project through the last six years: the building that opened is smaller than the one announced and cost about forty percent more.
What did not get cut is the part that matters to the region. The new hospital carries 82 licensed inpatient beds on its medical-surgical and pediatric intensive care units, every room private, every room built with family quarters — a pull-out bed and a bathroom for the parents who are, in a children’s hospital, part of the care team whether the floor plan admits it or not.
What the building is
The emergency department is pediatric-only and runs around the clock: 29 exam rooms, a 10-bay treatment-in-process and results-waiting area, a dedicated ambulance bay, and four behavioral-health reduced-risk rooms — the last item being the one that dates the design honestly. A children’s ED drawn a decade ago would not have carried dedicated behavioral-health rooms; one drawn after 2020 does, because the patients were already arriving.
Upstairs are eight operating rooms and an all-pediatric surgical center built around a hybrid catheterization and interventional radiology suite — one room that can image and intervene without moving a child between suites. A dedicated neonatal and pediatric transport team works fixed-wing, rotor-wing, and ground, with a rooftop helipad above them. The project team was ESa on design, WSP on building systems engineering, Structural Design Group on structure, and Layton | Abbott Construction as general contractor, with Tacoma’s AHBL on civil and landscape work.
And then there is the program a children’s hospital carries that no adult hospital does: three patient play and activity rooms, a space built for teenagers, an outdoor garden, the hospital’s first therapy gym, and the Kite Café pouring a Mary Bridge blend from Sumner-based Dillanos Coffee Roasters. A 400-space garage serves patients and visitors, connected to the hospital by a covered walkway. None of that is decoration. In pediatric care, play is assessment and therapy at once, a parent who can sleep in the room is a calmer patient in the bed, and a garden on the campus is a clinical tool with a groundskeeping budget. The floor plan is the philosophy.
Move day
The community got its look first — a ribbon cutting on May 2 — and then the building had to be activated and the patients moved. Staff rehearsed procedures with manikins to learn a facility none of them had worked in, because a children’s hospital cannot be learned on its patients. On opening day, roughly sixty children were transferred across the street from the old Mary Bridge space inside Tacoma General to the new hospital — published counts of the day’s moves differ slightly, 57 in one account and 61 in another, which is about right for a day that counts patients several ways.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us to get the patients moved over and get the building activated,” chief operating officer Ben Whitworth told KNKX before the opening. That sentence contains the whole discipline. A hospital move is not a relocation; it is a commissioning event with patients in it — every medical-gas outlet, every nurse call, every isolation room verified in a building whose staff are simultaneously learning where the supply rooms are. Across the street helped: the transport was measured in yards, not miles. But yards or miles, the rule is the same — the new building is a construction project until the first patient is in a bed and the systems hold, and after that it is a hospital with a punch list.
What Tacoma General gets back
The move is also the largest gift Tacoma General has received in years: its pediatric tenant’s space, returned. “The space that pediatric patients were taking up at Tacoma General, now that’s clear for adult patients to have more access,” Whitworth told KNKX. “We truly are expanding access to care in this whole community for kids and adults.” One construction project, two hospitals’ capacity problems addressed — the children’s hospital gets a building designed for children, and the adult hospital gets room to grow into, on the campus pattern this series described in Pierce County’s facility types.
The designation that anchors the new building’s regional role did not change with the address. On the Washington Department of Health’s trauma list, Mary Bridge remains the Level II pediatric trauma center for Western Washington — the only other Level II pediatric designation in the state is in Spokane, with Harborview holding Level I in Seattle — and it serves more than 100,000 children a year. In the county’s trauma ladder, the rung the whole system plans around, in emergency planning between the mountain and the fault, now sits in a building built for exactly that job.
Still building
The campus is not finished. In August 2026, MultiCare opened an expanded Mary Bridge outpatient center on the campus — 85 exam rooms and 10 infusion bays among its program — and the hospital projects more than 250 new positions by 2028 as the new capacity fills. During construction, AHBL’s team notes, Tacoma General, the operating Mary Bridge, and the neighboring clinic building all stayed active while crews coordinated the unglamorous essentials — water, sewer, medical gases, emergency power — across a site where three facilities never closed. That is the real story of this project, and it is the same story as every project this site covers: the building the public photographs is the last ten percent. The other ninety is keeping the old one alive until the new one can take the weight.
Mary Bridge began in 1955 as the region’s first standalone children’s hospital, spent nearly forty years as a guest inside an adult hospital’s walls, and has now come home to its own ground — bigger, private-roomed, and built around the families who were always part of the care plan. Tacoma’s children’s hospital has its own plant again. The people who run it have the work orders to prove it.
Sources: Becker’s Hospital Review (April–September 2026); Building Design+Construction project profile (July 17, 2026); KNKX (May 4, 2026); KIRO 7 / MyNorthwest; Healthcare Design Magazine photo tour (July 9, 2026); Mary Bridge Children’s, “Our New Hospital”; Washington State Department of Health, Trauma Designated Services (DOH 530-101, May 2026).
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