Pia Hallenberg

TripAdvisor.com has released its 2014 Traveler’s Choice Awards and it includes Manito Park, which was named one of the top 25 parks in the country. Other winners include New York City’s Central Park and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Eric Blauer, a pastor at Jacob’s Well Church, knows the people in his East Fifth Avenue neighborhood very well. He knows where the single parents live, which homes are rentals and which are owned by lifelong residents. He knows where the drug dealers live and where the prostitutes take their customers.

It’s one of the last buildings standing on the east side of Market Street. The neighboring Safeway to the north and Ziggy’s Lumber to the south have been torn down to make room for the soon-to-be-built North Spokane Corridor. Now the wrecking ball is headed for Community Colleges of Spokane’s Hillyard Center, which will close when this quarter is over June 19.

When Douglas Kempthorne was called into the principal’s office at Gonzaga Preparatory School it wasn’t a reprimand that was waiting for him. It was a dinner invitation from Dirk Kempthorne, former governor of Idaho and the man the teen is named after. “It was great meeting him,” said Douglas, who graduated this month from Gonzaga Prep.

Carried by balloons and construction paper parachutes, cushioned by bubble wrap and supported by Popsicle sticks and straws, raw eggs sailed through the air at Franklin Elementary School’s egg drop on Tuesday. A group of product development engineers from Siemens spent the morning with third- and fourth-grade students, coaching them through the development of a contraption that would carry an egg safely through the air starting with a 6-foot drop and ending with a 25-foot drop.

Karen Kearney had an idea: She would like a Little Free Library in her neighborhood. Instead of building one by herself she approached nearby Salk Middle School and asked if a class there would be interested in the project. “I’ve seen free libraries all over Spokane – just not one near me,” Kearney said.

Here’s one sure sign summer is coming: Make A Splash has already handed out 599 free swimsuits to children who can’t afford to purchase their own – and the nonprofit organization has 500 more on the way. “We give away swimsuits in the city and in the county,” said Heather Beebe-Stevens, executive director of the Parks Foundation which runs the Make A Splash in a Kid’s Life campaign.

The city of Spokane held an open house about the University District Bridge on Thursday presenting the $12 million to $13 million pedestrian bridge that would span Martin Luther King Jr. Way and the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe tracks just south of the Riverpoint Campus. The pedestrian bridge would connect the location of Washington State University’s rapidly expanding College of Medical Sciences north of the tracks with the neighborhood south of the tracks.

Julia Bryan, 19, has traveled around the world and is learning a new language. Bryan was born in Ukraine. As a 6-year-old she was abandoned by her mother and left in the care of an orphanage.

Ask Jareth Heilman to describe himself and he’ll say he’s the class clown, the sweetheart, the funny guy. “People think I can’t be serious and they are shocked when they find out what I’ve been through,” Heilman said. “Humor is how I deal with a lot of stuff.”

When the first flood hit Tolstoy Farms on Feb. 13, it was so unusually violent neighbors called it a 50-year flood. Water came rushing down the canyon side carrying silt, rocks and small boulders, filling up Saben Creek –Tolstoy’s main water supply. Water spilled over creek banks and flooded the main driveway, fields and two homes, as it rushed into the larger Mill Creek. Four days later the flooding stopped – and so did the creek. “Then it happened again,” said Laura Harris, who’s lived and worked on the farm near Davenport, Washington for 20 years.

When the last of the more than 5 million visitors to Expo ’74 jumped on a bus leaving town, Spokanites had pulled off a World’s Fair they would be talking about for generations. They’d also created the beginnings of Riverfront Park: a huge green space with a gondola ride spanning the falls and an IMAX theater featuring the newest in projection technology. In the following 40 years, few major changes have been made to the park. The Pavilion lost its roof in the 1980s and it was not replaced. Events run on a tangle of extension cords, and access to bathrooms and parking is limited. And though Spokane residents may be familiar with the park’s layout, visitors from out of town are better off listening for the falls than trying to find a sign showing the way.

Early Tuesday students at Riverside Technical Academy began building an environmentally friendly house they designed. Constructed out of structural insulated panels – or SIP – the small house features living quarters and a kitchen and deck.

The Mirror Pond at Manito Park still has a duck-feeding issue. It’s not as bad as it was before the big duck roundup in 2008 when Parks Department staff corralled and relocated 35 domestic ducks that were living off bread handouts in the pond.