Once Again, Taxpayers Really Got Intermodaled

The 24-hour, full-service restaurant went under like a cockroach in a bowl of runny oatmeal.

The 11,000 square feet of window-lined, third-floor office space remains a wasted, unrented tomb.

The ample area for convenient front yard parking was sacrificed for $60,000 worth of boulders some snobs call art.

The trains roll in on time, sure, but well after midnight, when most sane people are home sawing logs.

Welcome to Spokane’s expensive and forgotten 2-year-old Intermodal Center at First and Bernard.

Taxpayers took a $9 million reaming to turn the city’s funky old Northern Pacific Railroad station into a grand bus and train transit mecca. Bureaucrats assured us the pricey palace would add a jolt of much-needed pizazz to our enfeebled downtown.

Jolt? You couldn’t run a joy buzzer off the Intermodal excitement so far generated.

With the last morning bus departing at 10:30 and the first evening bus arriving at 5, this place is deader than Nixon. A similar loneliness settles in at night between 6:30 and 11:45 p.m. The trains don’t arrive until 1:30 a.m.

It’s a sobbing shame our leaders haven’t found a paying tenant for the third floor. Or put this beautiful place to wider use with art shows, live music and other events that would draw the non-traveling public.

“The city can’t run anything right,” grouses Duane Eshelman, a Greyhound and Amtrack employee who worked in the second-floor cafe until it closed in December due to lack of customers. “The restaurant failed because the third-floor space was never rented.”

Working a night shift in the Greyhound-owned gift shop, Eshelman offers his comments as a private citizen only - not as a spokesman for his employers.

He seems to know what he’s talking about, nonetheless.

The eight huge tipsy chunks of basalt planted outside the entrance, plus the landscaping to accommodate them, took away most of the valuable acreage for public parking, leaving only 60 slots.

Eshelman calls the intrusive rockery the “walkway of the gods.” He and other intermodalers, such as Amtrak’s Daniel Votava, see the parking loss as a prime reason nobody has rented the top floor.

The city-owned depot wasn’t designed with bottom-line business considerations in mind, suggests Eshelman, but rather “so somebody could win an architectural award.”

It is a spiffy place, light years lovelier than before the renovation. Or the ramshackle former Greyhound station that could have doubled as a prison waiting room.

All the modern amenities are found inside the Intermodal Center’s vintage exterior: wide open space, piped-in music, tile floors, Snapple machines, video games and sweeping escalators.

City pooh-bahs view the revamped depot as a long-term investment that will become more valuable when more people turn to public transportation. “I’m looking at a 10- to 20-year picture” for that to happen, says Glenn Miles of the Spokane Regional Transportation Council.

Ever noticed how easy it is for bureaucrats to look at the long haul when their own money isn’t on the line?

Spokane City Manager Bill Pupo believes the right tenant will eventually find a home on the center’s third floor.

In fact, an offer to take over the third floor was put on the table Monday by the Children’s Museum of Spokane. We should take it. Even though the museum can only pay less than half what the city wants, it’s far better than the zilch we’ve collected for two years.

The Intermodal Center will always be a second-rate transit hub, however, until Amtrak schedules a daylight train in Spokane.

Trains still occupy a very romantic place in the hearts of most Americans. Many of us would be thrilled to take a scenic, rumbling journey to, say, Seattle.

But who wants to play Boxcar Willie in the black of night?

The gobbledygook name of the joint should definitely go.

What is an intermodal, anyway? That word can’t be found in the newspaper’s 2,700-page Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Miles defensively concedes he dreamed it up, adding, “We had to name it something.”

Boy, there’s profound reasoning. We all got intermodaled on this.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)