Distinctive But Incomplete, It’s Brimming With Potential

Last Thanksgiving in Seattle, my sister and I decided to take our children downtown to see the Christmas decorations.

She lives near Seattle Center, so we paid to park the car there, hurried through the rain to the monorail, paid for our tickets, then stood and waited to board the train for downtown. As our children began to fuss, other passengers crowded behind us, around us and, finally, in front of us on the platform. The veins in her neck began to throb.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing!” she answered.

“Oh,” I said.

She leaned closer and whispered, “It’s just that the attendant asks everyone to stand behind the line, and every time we take the monorail people push ahead.”

She looked at me as though I should be indignant about this.

“If it stresses you out, why don’t we go to the mall?”

“No!”

The train doors opened. We picked up our children and rushed aboard with everyone else. Despite the pushing of the Biggest-Shopping-Day-of-the-Year crowd, there were seats for everyone.

“I mean,” my sister continued, her face returning to its usual color, “the mall is not Seattle. Downtown is Seattle. What’s the point of living here if you don’t go into the city?”

We got ourselves downtown. Once there, our children were overjoyed by the Christmas windows and overstimulated in FAO Schwarz. We paid a little too much for a bagel and coffee, and a lot too much for a Thomas the Tank Engine.

We were solicited by numerous panhandlers and by a sidewalk masseuse. We spent a while examining a studded leather biker babe outfit neither one of us would dare dip a thigh into. We had a great time.

I keep hearing complaints about Spokane’s downtown. Not enough parking and what’s there is expensive. The shopping is either too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough. There isn’t any variety.

While I have not seen a whole lot of studded leather downtown, I did take my children to a birthday party for Dr. Seuss at Auntie’s Bookstore. As the parking attendant charged me $1, a friend in my car muttered, “Criminal.”

One dollar is criminal? That was all I spent. I parked adjacent to the building, my children heard an hour of stories from “The Cat in the Hat” and ate a slice of birthday cake. I would be hard-pressed to find such an inexpensive and accessible activity in another city’s downtown.

Early in 1995, my husband and I had the opportunity to move from our home in Oregon to San Diego or Spokane. Each of us had lived in Spokane before but I had never been to San Diego, so we scheduled a look-and-see trip.

Once there, we met with a real estate agent. The neighborhoods she showed us were part of a suburb near my husband’s company, about 30 miles from downtown. I asked the agent if public transportation into the city was convenient.

“You mean a bus or something?” She looked at me as though I was wearing my shirt inside out. “Why would you want to go downtown?” She explained that this fabulous suburb was a “master planned community,” with each uniform housing development feeding residents to the main arterial, which, like some sort of twisted yellow brick road, led everyone to The Mall.

“Go to the mall!” she urged us. “You’ll love it! Who needs the city?”

Dutifully, we went to the mall. And there it was. The Gap. Mrs. Fields. A Magic-Eye “art” kiosk. Naturally artificial light streamed in from nowhere. Naturally artificial shrubs dotted the landscape. The air moved, but not because a breeze was blowing.

It was 70 degrees outside in San Diego, but we could have been in Paramus, N.J., in a snow storm, and the mall would have felt the same. What would be the point of living in San Diego, a city with an attractive and diverse downtown, if all we were going to do was go to the mall?

We chose Spokane because we like the community. The nature of the community is reflected everywhere downtown. It shows in the variety of artwork. It is there in the odd juxtaposition of an IMAX theater next to parking-lot carnival-style rides, or the soup kitchen next door to an upscale microbrewery. It is evident from the Bon to Boo Radley’s, to the hit-and-miss nightlife. It is in new construction projects fighting for approval and old buildings hoping to be restored.

Spokane seems a city in between: a small town striving for greater diversity and an urban center striving for its own identity. It is a city waiting to achieve its potential. The fact that it hasn’t is part of its attractiveness.

It comes with its frustrations, certainly, but it also lends the feeling that residents willing to make the effort can shape the community into what it will become.

There in downtown, among the traffic lights and the transients and the noise, are possibilities that cannot be found at a mall.

MEMO: Mary Douthitt is a member of The Spokesman-Review’s Board of Contributors.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Mary Douthitt Contributing writer