Brookdale is a roadside group of dwellings and small stores. Regarded as an extension of Parkland in the 1940s, today it is a suburb of Tacoma as well as an independent village. In the 1940s the flat prairie country around it was thinly forested with scrub oak and Douglas fir.

It was a former stop on the street car lines of the Tacoma Railway and Power Company. Thomas Hall platted a town site in 1891 and established a post office in 1893 which closed in 1898.