Then and Now: The Shopping Center Building

The Shopping Center Building, seen on the right in the top photo, featured a parking garage above and an F.W. Woolworth store on the first floor. It opened in 1955 and was part of River Park Square in that era.

The garage featured two Pigeon Hole parking machines, which placed cars in slots in a large steel frame.

The five-and-dime started by F.W. Woolworth in 1878 in Utica, New York, grew to be one of the largest retail businesses of the 20th century. It was a popular stop in downtown Spokane, where shoppers could get a simple plain or toasted sandwich and a soda for four bits.

An earlier generation’s “dime store” had, by midcentury, become a variety store with sunglasses, makeup, live pets and gift items. But even as the new Woolworth’s was opening in the 1950s, five-and-dime stores were on the wane, competing with malls, suburban supermarkets and drugstores.

“Dime stores today are as passé as mustache cups and cuspidors,” read a Spokesman-Review story in 1969. M.K. Ganson, manager of the F.W. Woolworth store at the time, said, “We are a quality variety store, not a dime store.”

But the downtown store was gone by 1980, replaced with a Rainier Bank branch. The Shopping Center Building was torn down in the 1990s for the rebuilding of River Park Square. The Woolworth name disappeared entirely in 2001, with the corporation rebranding itself as its most profitable subsidiary, Foot Locker.