Showing 1 - 13 of 13 results

Davenport Hotel (Spokane)

Davenport Hotel of Spokane opened its doors on September 1, 1914, and was soon acclaimed one of the world's grand hotels. Spokane already had fine hotels, but civic and business leaders, intent on increasing the population of the already flourishing city, were convinced that a large, elegant hotel attracting more conventions, business people, and tourists would help achieve that goal. In restaurateur Louis M. Davenport (1868-1951) these promoters discovered an ideal man to carry out their project. Louis Davenport hired Spokane architect Kirtland Kelsey Cutter (1860-1939) to design the hotel, and Cutter's dignified building and aesthetic interior appointments resulted in an unsurpassed facility. Davenport's genius for restaurant and hotel management provided hotel guests from presidents to humble traveling salesmen with a level of comfort and hospitality that would become legendary.
File 7545: Full Text >

Felts Field (Spokane)

Felts Field, Spokane's historic airfield, is located on the south bank of the Spokane River east of Spokane proper. Aviation activities began there in 1913. In 1920 the field, then called the Parkwater airstrip, was designated a municipal flying field at the instigation of the Spokane Chamber of Commerce. In 1926, the United States Department of Commerce officially recognized Parkwater as an airport, one of the first in the West. In September 1927, in conjunction with Spokane's National Air Derby and Air Races, the airport was renamed Felts Field for James Buell Felts (1898-1927), a Washington Air National Guard aviator killed in a crash that May. Parkwater Aviation Field, later Felts Field, was the location for flight instruction, charter service, airplane repair, aerial photography, headquarters of the 116th Observation Squadron of the Washington Air National Guard, and eventually the first airmail and commercial flights in and out of Spokane. After World War II, commercial air traffic moved to Geiger Field (later Spokane International Airport). Felts Field remains a busy regional hub for private and small-plane aviation and related businesses and services. In 1991 it was designated Felts Field Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.
File 8464: Full Text >

Fox Theater (Spokane)

Spokane's Fox Theater, today called the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, is a 1931 Art Deco movie theater turned modern concert hall. Located on Monroe Street between Sprague and 1st avenues, it is also one of the best-restored of the grand Fox "movie palaces." The Fox opened on September 3, 1931, in a gala event that included a number of top Fox movie stars. It immediately became the grandest and most opulent theater in the city, with huge Art Deco sunburst light fixtures, murals, and a grand staircase to the balcony. It also served as the city's main concert hall for its first three decades, hosting such stars as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jascha Heifetz, and Vladimir Horowitz. Beginning in the 1950s, the theater went into a long, slow decline. In 1975, the theater was partitioned into a triplex. In 1989, it became a discount movie house. Demolition appeared to be its fate in 2000, but the Spokane Symphony staged a massive fundraising to purchase it, and a second campaign to renovate it as a concert hall. After years of work, it reopened on November 17, 2007, and became the home of the Spokane Symphony.
File 8631: Full Text >

Mount Spokane State Park

Mount Spokane, the largest of Washington state parks, began as a small privately owned parcel of land on the flank of the 5,883-foot mountain in northeast Spokane County. The mountain, its rounded dome easily visible from Spokane, is slightly more than an hour's drive northeast of the city. The summit affords views in all directions: the city and valley of Spokane, North Idaho lakes, the Pend Oreille River, even peaks in Canada. Over the years, through purchases and donations, the property that became the park has been expanded to 14,000 acres. It is now a major recreational area for Eastern Washington, providing excellent facilities for winter and summer activities.
File 7819: Full Text >

Olmsted Parks in Spokane

Nearly all Spokane's beautiful parks and parkways were first conceived by a legendary firm: the Olmsted Brothers, Landscape Architects, of Brookline, Massachusetts, of New York's Central Park fame. In 1907, Aubrey L. White (1868-1948), the first president of the young city's new Park Board, was determined to make Spokane into a model of modern park planning. White discovered that John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920) was making trips out west to oversee other projects in the Northwest, so convinced him to make stopovers in Spokane. On these trips Olmsted and his associates roamed the city's bluffs, river gorge, and forests. His firm issued a report in 1908 proposing an ambitious plan that called for four massive new parks, five smaller local parks, 11 playfields, numerous parkways, and major improvements to 10 existing parks. Many of these recommendations were put into effect following the passage of a $1 million bond issue in 1910. By 1913, the city had multiplied its park acreage tenfold. Today, many of Spokane' best-known public spaces, including the Finch Arboretum, High Bridge Park, and Downriver Park, owe their existence to the Olmsted report. Even pre-existing parks, including Manito Park, owe much of their aesthetic appeal to Olmsted suggestions. Olmsted even foresaw that the city would one day reclaim the downtown riverfront, which became Riverfront Park in 1974. A century after the report was drafted, Spokane' park planners and civic activists still look to the Olmsted Report for guidance.
File 8218: Full Text >

Shadle Park: Spokane's First "Modern" High School

Shadle Park High School, located at 4327 N Ash Street in northwest Spokane, was built in the mid-1950s and opened for classes in September 1957. Designed by Culler, Gale, Martell & Norriet, the building was Spokane's first Modernist-style high school. The asymmetrical, multi-tiered structure is made of concrete, glass, and composite materials. Shadle Park High School had a notable building and also met with almost immediate success both in the educational and athletic fields, earning many awards and accolades. This is a tradition the school has continued ever since. The building was remodeled in 2007-2008.
File 8724: Full Text >

Spokane -- Thumbnail History

Spokane is the largest city in Eastern Washington and the commercial hub for an interstate area known formerly as the Inland Empire and now as the Inland Northwest. After settlement in the 1870s, it quickly became the county seat of Spokane County and the regional center for mining, agriculture, timber, transportation, education, and medical services. Urban development has spread far beyond the 2005 population of 200,000 residing within the present city limits in a county of almost 430,000. Spokane, like many cities, has undergone periods of boom, bust, stagnation, and recovery. For well over 100 years, it has provided a welcome urban oasis in the less populated stretch of plains and mountains between the Mississippi River and Seattle.
File 7462: Full Text >

Spokane Neighborhoods: Hillyard -- Thumbnail History

Hillyard, known today as a neighborhood in Spokane's northeast quadrant, began as a separate town in 1892. It was built around the Great Northern Railroad's rail yards and named after Great Northern magnate James J. Hill (1838-1916): literally, Hill's Yard. Before that, Hudson's Bay fur traders referred to Hillyard and the surrounding areas as Horse Plains or Wild Horse Prairie. Hillyard was first platted as a townsite in 1892 when the Great Northern Railroad arrived and chose this flat ground as the site for its rail yards, machine shops and roundhouse. By 1895 it had 486 residents, but as the rail yards expanded over the next two decades it experienced a boom in population to about 4,000 by 1916. Many of these new residents were immigrant laborers, and Hillyard came to be known for its Italian and Japanese neighborhoods. In 1924, Hillyard was annexed by Spokane and it has been part of the city ever since, retaining its own industrial, blue-collar character. Hillyard has long been known as an economically depressed part of Spokane, a problem exacerbated by the closing of the last remnants of the rail yards in 1982. Hillyard continues to have one of the lowest per capita income levels in Spokane and in the state. Yet it also has well-groomed neighborhoods, a golf course, and a thriving antique district. New residents from Russia and Southeast Asia have recently arrived, continuing Hillyard's legacy as a haven for immigrants. The neighborhood's historic business district is on both the Spokane Register of Historic Districts and the National Register of Historic Places.
File 8406: Full Text >

Spokane's Japanese Community

Japanese immigrants first arrived in Eastern Washington during the late 1800s and early 1900s, mostly as railroad workers and mine laborers. Many went back to Japan when the work ran out, yet a significant number stayed and settled in Spokane. Around 1910, the population of Issei (Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (first generation Japanese Americans) reached about 1,000, many living in a crowded downtown block called Japanese Alley. The population declined to only about 383 by 1935 because many Japanese families sailed back to Japan and new immigration was banned. Yet when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, it marked the beginning of a population boom for Spokane's Japanese community, because Spokane was outside the coastal evacuation zone. A flood of Japanese Americans from Seattle and the West Coast, seeking to avoid being sent to relocation camps, arrived in Spokane, causing the population to at least triple. The war years were difficult for the Japanese American community, which was often shunned and distrusted by the mainstream population, even though a number of Spokane Japanese Americans served heroically during the war. After 1945, many families returned to their homes in Western Washington and Oregon, but a significant number remained in Spokane. Since then, the Japanese community has slowly been absorbed into the larger community, yet it continues to celebrate its heritage with annual Japan Week festivities and other cultural activities.
File 8048: Full Text >

Spokane's Jewish Community

The first Jewish synagogue in the state opened in Spokane in 1892, but the city's Jewish history began even before the little village of Spokane Falls existed. In 1879, Indians told Simon Berg, the first known Jewish resident, that he was not the first "egg-eater" they had met. Apparently, other Jewish traders observing the kosher dietary rules had visited before. Berg built a store in tiny Spokane Falls in 1879 and by 1885 he had been joined by at least a dozen other Jewish merchants. The town's first Jewish services were held in a private home in 1885. In 1890, the Jewish community met to organize a Reform congregation, called Congregation Emanu-El. On September 14, 1892, they dedicated their synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, the first in the state by four days, since Seattle's Ohaveth Sholum opened within a week. Jewish merchants and financiers played a key role in the development of Spokane during its early decades. A second congregation, the Orthodox Keneseth Israel congregation was formed in 1901. Both congregations thrived until they merged in 1966 and built a new, modern temple, the Temple Beth Shalom. It remains the center of Spokane's Jewish community today. The city's Jewish population has remained steady through the decade, yet is estimated at less than 1 percent of the metropolitan area's population.
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Spokane's Old Chinatown: Trent Alley -- Thumbnail History

From the 1880s through the 1940s, a bustling Chinatown -- or to be more accurate, an international district -- thrived in downtown Spokane. It began in the 1880s mostly as a stopping point for Chinese and Japanese workers imported to work in railroad camps and mines. In those first decades, the district was a teeming slum. The city's majority white residents considered Chinatown to be both an exotic attraction and a den of iniquity that required periodic raids. By about 1900, Trent Alley began to become more respectable as more families, especially Japanese families, began to move in. For the next two decades it was filled with Japanese hotels, boarding houses, fish markets, restaurants, barber shops, and billiards halls. The neighborhood was hit hard by the Great Depression, but saw a brief revival during World War II due to an influx of Japanese American families escaping the evacuation zones in Western Washington and Oregon. After the war, the Asian American population began to disperse to other areas of the city and Trent Alley lost most of its Asian character. Most of the old buildings and courtyards were razed as part of the urban renewal projects for Expo '74, Spokane's World Fair. Today, the old Chinatown has disappeared, paved over for vast parking lots for Spokane's performing arts and convention centers.
File 8120: Full Text >

Spokane's Streetcars

From 1888 to 1936, streetcars played a clanging and colorful role in the history of Spokane. The city's first streetcar was pulled down Riverside Avenue by a team of horses. Within two years, steam-powered streetcars, cable cars, and electric trolleys were rolling through the city's streets. Within six years, Spokane's streetcars had all been converted to electricity. Streetcars played an important role in the city's expansion. Real-estate developers built the early streetcar lines as an incentive for homebuyers to purchase lots outside of walking distance of downtown. By 1910, ridership was up to 24 million riders a year. Ridership began to decline around 1915 because of competition from jitney cabs and personal automobiles. In 1922 the two remaining trolley companies merged and became Spokane United Railways. Ridership declined another 33 percent from 1922 to 1933, at which point Spokane United Railways began to convert all of its routes to buses. The last trolley rolled through Spokane in 1936.
File 8080: Full Text >

Spokane: Early Education

Education efforts in the Spokane area began with the local Native Americans, were then picked up by missionaries, and subsequently brought into the mainstream of Euro-American civic life. Like any other community educational system, its development was a matter of funding, and the citizens of Spokane showed themselves more than willing to contribute. As a result, during the early years of the twentieth century, the city was able to maintain a network of modern educational facilities worthy of a growing metropolis.
File 8723: Full Text >