Then & Now galleries

Before bridges crossed the gorge in the 1880s, the Spokane River was a challenging obstacle for people on the north side of the Spokane. Some hardy homesteaders lived on the north banks but there were few businesses.

Imagine a newcomer to Spokane stepping off a train in 1928 and turning east onto Riverside Ave. at Monroe St. and taking in the panoply of buildings that rival the storied cities of Los Angeles or Chicago. Then it was called the “civic center”, and today is the Riverside Avenue Historic District.

In 1892, James J. Hill, the architect and president of the Great Northern Railroad, arrived in Spokane. He told a newspaper reporter: “I am coming here to get your business and to carry your freight.” He was anxious to complete his company’s tracks through Spokane, already an important train hub of the northwest.

Ever since a human managed to shinny up on the back of a horse, someone wanted to race. Endurance racing, flat track, harness racing and steeplechase racing became popular in many different cultures around the world.

Settlers William and Johanna Pringle homesteaded in Eastern Spokane County in 1883, near a railroad stop called Otis. In 1903, Mark Mendenhall and Laughlin MacLean contracted to use a drainage ditch to bring water from Newman Lake to Otis, which they promoted in Chicago, a major hub for apple auctions, with pamphlets titled “Irrigation is King.” The name was changed to Otis Orchards.

Francis Cook, the publisher of the Tacoma Herald newspaper, was lured to Spokane in 1879 by the offer of free land from city father James N. Glover. He could have the corner of Riverside and Howard St. if he would open a newspaper to serve the growing town. Cook began publishing The Spokan Times. But the massive 1889 fire destroyed Cook’s two-story wood-frame building and in its place rose the Rookery, a block of four buildings that housed banks, lawyers, dry goods and many other business activities in the heart of the city.

There were cars before the advent the gas station. Earliest fuel stops were general stores where a motorist could fill a gas can. Harold Dockendorf sold Ford cars for Bronson Motors before opening Doc’s Snappy Service at the corner of Sprague Ave. and Mullan Rd.

When white immigrants began settling permanently in the Spokane area in the 1870s, it was a particularly hard scrabble group who chose the rural Spokane Valley to try and eek out a meager subsistence raising vegetables, cattle, tree fruit and wheat. Land was cheap, but the tiny settlements like Dishman, Opportunity, Veradale, Greenacres and Otis Orchards were isolated far from the city lights of Spokane.

The corner of Howard St. and Spokane Falls Blvd. was the where Spokane’s story began. Original settlers James Downing and Seth Scranton drove the first surveyor’s stake there in 1871. It was where city founder James Nettle Glover built his store and livery stables, seen at right in the photo above, in 1877.

Kelly Olynyk was described by this newspaper in 2009 as “a versatile Canadian capable of playing several positions.” It was but one line in a look ahead to the 2009-10 team after a successful run to the Sweet Sixteen that year. Fast forward to 2012. Olynyk, who returned from a redshirt year, has added 30-plus pounds and a couple inches to his now-7-foot frame. He’s stronger and can jump higher. He’s the West Coast Conference Player of the Year and a candidate for the prestigious John R. Wooden Award.

The invention of the automobile changed everyday life in small and large ways. Independent travel, instead of horses, buggies or trains, became the norm. Travelers needed gas, convenient food and drink and places to spend the night. The drive-in restaurant appeared in the early 1920s, when drivers in Ford Model Ts would pull in and “tray boys” would hop on the running board and take orders to expedite service and guests would eat in their cars.

The twin stacks of the Central Steam Plant were completed in 1916 by the Merchants Central Heating Company. The 225-foot stacks used 333,340 bricks and extend above the elegant facility designed by Kirtland Cutter and Karl Malmgren.

Prominent in the1929 photo, taken from the Paulsen Medical and Dental Building, are the elevated rail lines leading to Spokane’s Union Station, an elegant brick edifice finished in 1914. Behind that is the tower of the Great Northern Depot, which was also a grand marble-floored hall built by railroad baron James Jerome Hill in 1902.

In 1954, the nuclear bomb was on everyone’s mind. Would the Russians attack without warning? Spokane was chosen as the first city in the nation to attempt a complete evacuation of its downtown area, about 70 square blocks.

During Spokane’s boom era of the 1880s through the early 20th century, downtown Spokane was packed with workers, mainly men, living in single resident occupancy buildings, called SRO hotels, when not at their jobs in construction, factories, retail, hospitality and service businesses. Cooped up in tiny bedrooms, they sought out entertainment after work, often a beer from a Spokane brewery and a locally-made hand-rolled cigar, like the ones produced by the Cuban Cigar Co. or Havana Cigar Manufacturing.

Levi Hutton and his wife, May Arkwright Hutton, financed the Hutton Building in 1907 with proceeds from their Hercules Mine in Idaho.

Spokane’s Hazelwood Farms was a leading Northwest dairy business when its founders, David and George Brown and John L. Smith, decided to subdivide and sell off their land holdings on Spokane’s West Plains in 1906.

In 1905, Washington formed a state highway department. As the automobile became more popular, the good roads movement gained steam. In 1907, the University of Washington established a highway engineering program, the first in the nation. The main route from Seattle to Spokane, which ran through Wenatchee, was called the Sunset Highway and, later, U.S. 10. That road, dubbed State Highway 2 in 1923, wound through Davenport and Reardan before coming down the hill into Spokane, then out Sprague Ave. and Appleway to the Idaho border.

Spokane’s Expo ‘74 continues to recede in the rear view mirror, but the silhouette of the former United States Pavilion reminds us of that one glorious summer of exhibitions, concerts, rides, famous faces and international visitors with its spider web of cables rising above Riverfront Park.

The natives of the region, who called themselves the Schee-Chu-Umsh, lived and camped around Lake Coeur d’Alene for many generations before the first white men, likely French explorers or trappers, approached Lake Coeur d’Alene in the early 1800s. Those first visitors nicknamed the locals “Coeur d’Alene”, those who have a “heart like an awl”, for their sharp skills as traders. Today, the town of the same name has grown into a tourist destination over the last century.