One can walk or jog along the river today, enjoy its green spaces, its skyride, hear the rumble of the water and the cries of water birds. The park creation and river restoration showed that an improved environment could encourage development that could successfully withstand the pull of sprawl and malls.

Spokanites are generally aware of this legacy; the rest of the world is not. But it is an important lesson about how the future and the past are not in conflict. Expo 74 was the first environmentally themed world's fair and it featured novel things like recycling, which was virtually unheard of in '62. The difference between 1962 and 1974 is the difference between a future envisioned as having unlimited resources and a subtext of disdaining the past to one of coping with potentially limited resources and embracing our heritage. Expo 74 would have embraced the challenges of, say, global warming, while Seattle's fair imagined new cars with individual nuclear reactors.

This is an excerpt from a great column by Knute Berger at Crosscut when he was in Spokane for the National Historic Preservation Conference. Berger was a co-panelist with Dr. Bill Youngs from Eastern Washington University and author of The Fair and The Falls: Expo 74, Tranforming An American Environment. Read the full story HERE. 

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