Then and now: Wellesley and Division

In 1963 Chud Wendle proposed to move his Ford car dealership near the corner of Wellesley Avenue and North Division Street.

Section:Gallery

Mon., Sept. 14, 2020

1963: The property in the center left of the photo, marked with a dotted white line, is the location of the Wendle Ford car dealership near the NorthTown shopping center. Wellesley is at the foreground, Atlantic at the left. Owner Chud Wendle would build his car dealership, eventually taking up the entire block. Across the street, NorthTown, which started with an Albertson’s supermarket, a Sears store and a handful of other shops, would grow into a massive retail destination mall, prompting the Wendle family to move their dealership north to the Division Y and turn the northwest corner of Division and Wellesley into a retail development called Northtown Square.

The Spokesman-Review Photo Archive
The northwest corner of the Wellesley-Division intersection was mostly gas stations in the 1940s and 1950s, then Chud Wendle built his dealership there in the 1960s. Wendle, moving from a downtown car lot, changed the name to Wendle Fordtown and did business there for almost 50 years. In 1995, the Wendle family built a another showroom at the North Division Y. In 2007, Wendle Northtown was torn down and replaced with a retail development called Northtown Square, while the dealership was consolidated at the Division Y location. Spokane’s first Red Lobster restaurant was place on the northwest corner of the intersection.

Jesse Tinsley The Spokesman-Review