Residents Sing Praises Of Urban Living

From her cozy, oak-floored and bookshelf-lined living room, Chris O’Harra can watch children scramble around Riverfront Park’s Red Wagon sculpture.

And should she happen to glance up at the Clock Tower and remember she promised to meet someone at Auntie’s Bookstore in one minute, no problem … the store lies just beyond her front door.

O’Harra - the “auntie” of Auntie’s - shares the Liberty Building with an assortment of other tenants, including a travel agency, art gallery, cafe, game emporium, card shop, loan center and architectural firm, as well as the 100,000-volume bookstore.

Her decision last year to sell her South Hill home and move into a 2,000-square-foot downtown apartment added O’Harra to the still-small but growing list of middle-class “pioneers” seeking an urban living experience among Spokane’s high-rises and homeless.

“I love the vibrancy of our downtown,” O’Harra says, “and I’ll do everything I can to promote it. I travel a lot, and I’ve seen so many downtowns that have been decimated. They’ve tried to bring them back, but once those (major retail) anchors are gone, it’s dead … it’s never the same.”

O’Harra admits missing her South Hill neighbors, and she laments having to drive to Browne’s Addition or 14th Avenue for supermarket shopping.

“But this is what I always wanted to do,” she says with dream-come-true delight. “I thought if I ever grew up and owned a grocery, I wanted to live above the store.

“This is perfect. I love books, I like people. … What better life could you have?”

Six blocks away on west Second Avenue, Doug and Shannon Davidson share O’Harra’s enthusiasm for urban living.

Three years ago, they paid $70,000 for a patch of property and four brick walls that once housed the Northwest’s largest German-language newspaper.

Immigrant Otto Jukeland erected the building in 1903, and published his Washington Post on the first floor while living upstairs with his family.

Later, the building saw duty as a grocery, apartments and a photo shop before eventually being abandoned. “When we found it,” recalls Doug, “the building was valued at zero and on a list to be torn down.”

That might not have been a bad idea. Doug spent 20 months and another $74,000 replacing virtually everything from rotting floors to a leaky roof.

“If I had known what it would take and how long,” he says, “we wouldn’t be here now. We’d be up on the South Hill somewhere.”

But it’s hard to picture this artistic couple content manicuring a lawn inside a white picket fence. “The suburbs are such a sleepy place,” muses Doug, “it’s tough to get motivated. Suburbs aren’t conducive to creative thought.”

Besides, says Shannon, “We were looking for a live/work space, because a lot of times we work late into the night. And since we have children” - four, from 1-1/2 to 14 years - “we didn’t want to work away from them. We wanted them to be a part of the fun.”

And “fun” is the operative word inside the Davidson household, starting the moment you step off the sidewalk across from Laser Quest and enter Shannon’s first-floor studio, where her works-in-progress compete for wall space with children’s artwork.

“For our 7-year-old’s birthday,” says Shannon, a mural painter, “instead of going to Chuck E Cheese’s, we built a school bus out of cardboard down here, and the kids ran around inside it.”

Winding stairs lead to second-floor living quarters: three funky bedrooms, two colorfully tiled baths, a handsomely finished kitchen, and a living-dining-library space that overlooks the studio.

“Most people walk in and say, ‘Wow, you’d never know it from the outside,”’ Shannon says with pride. “They wish they had the nerve to do this.”

Maybe, but life on West Second isn’t for everyone.

Consider, for instance, that 15,700 vehicles drive past the Davidsons’ front door on a typical weekday.

Carbon monoxide readings one block away on Third Avenue are often twice as high as suburban neighborhood levels. Four times last year and already once this year, the CO levels on Third violated the federal standard of 9 parts per million.

And then there was the “totally harmless” stranger who knocked on their door and introduced himself as singer Ricky Nelson.

But the Davidsons aren’t easily put off by the eccentricities of their urban neighborhood. In fact, they appear exhilarated by them.

“Part of the reason we moved here,” says Doug, “was a desire to break a pattern of suburbia. We threw caution to the wind, which is OK sometimes.

“Sure, there are some trade-offs, but quality-wise, health-wise, I don’t think they were that severe,” he says. “And mentally, creatively, we’re better off down here.”

Besides, the Davidsons see themselves as part of a movement to save downtown Spokane from the blight that has overtaken so many urban cores around America.

“When you come over the hill traveling east on I-90,” says Shannon, “you see this magical storybook city with its river and its park. This is a particularly wonderful city, and it’s a pity that it’s been allowed to deteriorate.”

Doug, an entertainment production manager, recently completed a 40-city concert tour and returned home more convinced than ever that downtown Spokane is worth fighting for.

“The best way to revitalize downtown is to get a broader mix of people living here,” he says. “And the best place to start is by providing people with live/work space.

“Those are the people who will invest their imagination and energy in making the downtown a cool place to visit and a nice place to live.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)