Shoreline Of Contrasts Mix Of Housing Styles Gives Riverfront An Eclectic Look

As Velma and Jim Jeanes climb their steep steps down to the Spokane River, she jokes that there are 51 steps down, but 79 back up. There’s no dock at the bottom of the stairs yet.

“When you’re on a fixed income, you have to do these things one at a time,” Velma said.

Their home at the top of the steps, a double-wide trailer, sits in stark contrast to a sparkling white luxury mansion next door, where a fixed income doesn’t seem to be an issue. The big house dominates the north bank and is for sale for $899,000.

Both homes are new to the river, just downstream of the Argonne Bridge. They illustrate well what a shoreline of contrasts this area has become.

Money has flowed into the neighborhood in quantities that leaves some oldtimers open-mouthed. Jeanes’ next door neighbor bought an acre in 1992 for $150,000. A lot with 80 feet of river frontage on the south bank recently sold for $80,000.

“Where does the money come from?” wonders Maryadele Banta Morton, a widow who’s delighted with the petite home her mother built on the south side of the river in the 1940s. “Why do they need to build such huge homes? They don’t have huge families.”

Agriculture and affordability once were the cornerstones of the neighborhood. Now world-class waterskiing and a profusion of waterfront regulations are part of the yin and yang.

Some oldtimers find the changes hard to take, especially the loss of pheasants and other birds. But mostly the neighbors simply watch each other’s varied lifestyles, across the water.

The Jeanes came back to Jim’s boyhood home on Maringo Drive with a doublewide trailer for themselves, and a mission: Keep Jim’s 92-year-old mother in her own home as long as possible.

“We came here to keep an eye on her,” said Velma. The family moved here in 1933, when Jim Jeanes was 13 years old.

“My stepfather bought that acre for $350,” Jeanes said. The river was not a consideration; the space was. “Nobody thought about the river in those days,” Jeanes said.

He remembers cows and truck farms, a big family garden - which he somehow managed to avoid weeding - and jumping off the Argonne Bridge on hot summer afternoons.

“His mother never knew!” said Velma.

Jim and Velma chuckle over the difference in size of the neighboring homes. They’ve got 1,700 square feet, while Norm Thomson’s home has 7,000 square feet.

“But you know, he’s never said a word about the difference in our places,” Jim said.

Thomson, for his part, believes larger, nicer homes will come in around his dream home.

“The older homes will go,” he said.

The rest of this unusual river neighborhood is a staggering confusion of new and old, shipshape and ramshackle. Through it all, runs a common thread of devotion to the river. Residents who have been on the river 20 years do not yet consider themselves oldtimers. One contractor built a home for himself on the north bank, then sold it and is now building a home on the south bank. One family remains on the river, even though the husband commutes to a job in Tacoma.

One characteristic of a river neighborhood is the south-bankers live with the shoreline view provided by the north-bankers, and vice versa. Theo Egan, who moved onto the south side of the river with her husband, Richard, about 30 years ago, once took that problem into her own hands. Or tried to.

“I took five little aspen trees. I had my nephew row me across and I planted them right there,” Egan said, pointing to a stretch of high, steep bank with little vegetation.

But it was in the late 1980s when the water level was drawn down for repairs to Upriver Dam, and Egan didn’t get water to her transplanted saplings soon enough. They died.

Egan also remembers tales from neighbor Ruth Taylor, now deceased.

“She moved here in the ‘30s. Park Road was the grand place to live,” she said. “This was no place. Nobody wanted to live down here on the river.”

Upstream, toward the Argonne Bridge, Wes Tate’s bee hives sit in a neat checkerboard on his lower field.

“Those hives will all go up to Greenbluff,”Tate says.

A widower, Tate remembers the day, the scene and each line in the conversation that led to the purchase of his 1919 home. Tate prized the property because there was room for horses. He walked down to the river and let his wife, Amy, examine the house.

His interest in the river? “Once I was satisfied we weren’t in any danger (from flooding), I went back up to the house.”

The Tates met back up in the kitchen and bought the house on the spot. The price was $15,900. The year was 1963.

Bill Fanning, a real estate agent who grew up waterskiing on the river, lives in a small house on the north bank that he bought 12 years ago. He still waterskiis, perhaps more now than he did as a youngster.

“I waterski every night during the week, after work,” Fanning said.

This fall, he’ll build a new house, closer to the river.

“The plans are all drawn up. I’m just waiting until I have the time and energy to get it going,” he said.

Most of the half dozen or so homes on the river for sale now are the older ones. The prices are mostly around $200,000. In three cases, the houses are for sale because their elderly owner died.

Fanning says he expects the buyers will be young professional couples who have the patience to wait until they can afford a major remodeling job or to build new. That’s the say he’s done it, after all.

Meanwhile, Velma Jeanes is simply itching to plant more flowers and to tidy up the long bank below her home.

“We can’t, though. We can’t take anything out,” Velma said.

She’s partly right, said Mike Maher of the Department of Ecology.

Under state and county regulation, shoreline homeowners may not remove vegetation within 50 feet of the high water mark. But they may plant native vegetation.

“Maybe we could get her to plant native flowers,” Maher said.

Thomson, who hopes to rebuild his dream home on the river in Post Falls, also has an improvement he wants to add to this home before he moves.

“I want to put in an outdoor slide,” he said. “All the way down to the water.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 photos (2 color)