Jesse Tinsley

Spokane Chronicle business writer Frank Bartel wrote in January of 1973 that visitors to Expo ’74 “will get a very close look at the seamier side of Spokane.”

The nine-story Welch Building, built by financier and railroad builder Patrick Welch at Howard Street and Main Avenue, opened as the home of the department store Culbertson, Grote-Rankin when it was built in 1914. The building took up a quarter of a city block and upper floors held many office tenants, including the Farm Credit Administration and Welch’s investment company.

Preparation for Expo ’74 led to clearing many aging commercial buildings from the Spokane River corridor. But some buildings from Spokane’s early businesses survived after the fair.

Although it took hundreds of architects, engineers, designers and builders to create Expo ’74, the artistic vision of artist Harold Balazs was everywhere at the world’s fair.

The stately five-story building, with a soaring roofline, on the northeast corner of Riverside Avenue and Washington Street has had several different names through the 20th century.

Stretching from the Model T to the Model A era, the Universal Auto Company was a Ford car dealership that began operation on Havermale Island. The name was likely borrowed from Ford’s nickname for the Model T as the “universal car,” referencing the car as a platform that could serve as a passenger car or adapted as a truck or cargo van. Fifteen million Model Ts were sold between 1908 and 1926.

It took several actions of the federal government to get the U.S. Pavilion built at Expo ’74 in Spokane.

Several bridges over the Spokane River for horse and auto traffic were once aligned with Washington Street stretching across the north and south river channels.

In 1941, there were 95 mail routes in Spokane and five still used horse-drawn mail carts traveling the city’s streets, including two in the downtown area.

The YMCA has served Spokane for more than 140 years, and its headquarters was in Riverfront Park from the 1960s to the early 2000s.

Marycliff High School was an all-girls Catholic school on Spokane’s South Hill that opened in 1929. The name was a combination of the name Mary with the word Undercliff, the property’s historic name.

The Washington Water Power Company formed in 1889 with a small group of investors, all of them focused on building a generating operation on the Spokane River’s lower falls just east of the Monroe Street Bridge. The citywide fire in August of that year spared the equipment and materials and construction continued.

Spokane’s downtown Sears store moved to the new NorthTown mall in 1960. Suburban locations were tempting other stores to move, prompting a movement to find new ways to attract shoppers and keep them downtown.

Businessman Richard F. Robertson of Kirkland, Washington, built Tiffany’s Skate Inn, a $700,000 roller-skating rink at 708 W. Boone Ave. that opened in 1968, offering the Lilac City another entertainment option. It was named for Robertson’s baby daughter. The 30,000-square-foot center had a 100-by-200-foot maple skating floor, a snack bar, pro shop and stage with theatrical lighting and dressing rooms. The managers were Jerry and Joan Peltier, certified skating instructors from the Seattle area.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Spokane’s population was exploding from 36,000 in 1900 to more than 100,000 by 1910. The city’s downtown post office, leasing space in the Auditorium Building, needed more room. A new post office and federal building, one of the first federal buildings in the region, was built at the corner of Riverside Avenue and Lincoln Street in 1909. The national government was now represented by a three-story stone edifice, at a cost of $600,000, at one of the city’s important intersections.

One of the more challenging demolition projects in the preparations for Expo '74 was the demolition of the steel Union Pacific railroad bridge over the Spokane River.  

At the Spokane International Airport, about 4 million passengers arrive and depart each year. Before 1965, the terminal building sat on the south side of the runways and United, Northwest and West Coast were the only airlines who used the field.

In the of 1973, the organizers of Expo ’74 took a major step toward the world’s fair success in Spokane by hiring Tommy Walker of Anaheim, California. Expo General Manager Petr Spurney pointed out that Walker was the country’s leading producer of outdoor events and it was appropriate that Walker would be the entertainment consultant to the Spokane fair.

The first Post Street bridge was a wooden structure built around 1884 and operated as a toll bridge. That bridge was taken down around 1893 and replaced with a steel bridge that could carry streetcars.

Here is a picture page of Spokesman-Review photographer Jesse Tinsley's favorite photos of 2023. 

The accompanying night photo shows the lighted Madonna and child decoration on the angled corner of the Bon Marche department store in 1957. The new store, completed in 1956, tied together the former Culbertson warehouse to the north and the Welch Building to the east. The store’s design team commissioned the hand-painted 12-by-48-foot backlit Madonna from Baldwin Sign Company for the store’s lighted corner. Perched above the Crescent department store marquee on the right is the 13-foot fiberglass Santa Claus figure, part of the store’s legendary holiday decor, which included motorized, animated window dioramas. The holiday extravaganza made the Crescent, a Spokane institution founded in 1889, the destination for holiday shoppers for almost a century.

Albert Edward Keats, born in Surrey, England, around 1852, was one of Spokane’s first generation of successful businessmen.

A small rural Chevrolet dealer, named for the apple orchards that once lined Sprague Avenue through the valley, grew to be one of the region’s biggest automotive enterprises.

This week’s photo, an aerial above the Spokane River in 1969, shows Spokane’s two major train stations still in place before the world’s fair in 1974. The train stations were mostly empty after decades of declining rail passengers. The proposal of a world’s fair would turn the city’s upcoming centennial celebration into something memorable.