Vision needed to save buildings

When the ash had settled following the fire that leveled Spokane in 1889, community leaders didn’t suggest that the remaining stark landscape be turned into a parking lot.

Instead, the community launched a building boom that lasted three decades and left Spokane a rich architectural legacy. Many of the resulting structures are still around. If we act wisely, they will serve community needs for many additional years.

Today, the Spokane Plan Commission will hold a hearing on a proposal to prevent the thoughtless conversion of historic downtown buildings and neighborhood landmarks into barren urban flatlands. The measure would prohibit the demolition of structures that are eligible to be listed on the national or local registers of historic places unless they were to be replaced by new construction. Exceptions would be made for public safety considerations.

Even if the ordinance is enacted, it won’t apply retroactively to the Rookery Block, for which a demolition permit is pending.

If the buildings there come down as planned, the sites are destined to join the growing inventory of surface parking lots and the sterile image they convey.

The proposed ordinance is scheduled to go to the Spokane City Council for a study session on Aug. 5 and after that for hearings. Advocates recognize the need to give property owners and developers incentives to restore and preserve historic buildings that sustain tradition and character and contribute affordable property for urban residential and commercial use.

To be successful, the demolition ordinance needs to recognize the economic realities associated with owning and maintaining downtown structures, especially aging ones with significant upkeep challenges. Thus, incentives are an integral part of any successful strategy.

City officials can’t do it alone, however. Help will be needed from the Legislature in the form of authorization to combine tax-relief benefits that now are available only separately.

If the Rookery, Merton and Mohawk buildings tumble, Spokane will lose part of its past and a potential part of its future. The wisdom of that will be measured by what occupies that site in the years and decades after.

Those properties are out of the public’s control, but other buildings and other blocks are not. Today’s civic leaders owe it to the community to be as visionary in the face of today’s wrecking balls as their predecessors were in the aftermath of fire.