Historic garden”s restoration under way, but needs help

Workers have righted a key section of stone staircase in a collection of garden ruins that provide a curious link to Spokane’s history.

Landscape work on an overgrown slope of Pioneer Park at Seventh Avenue and Howard Street is being undertaken this spring to protect some of the most significant ruins from being lost to further deterioration and vandalism.

But this week’s effort at the Moore-Turner Garden is a fraction of the $1.5 million needed to bring the historic landscape back to a publicly usable condition.

“This place was so beautiful back then,” said Corey David, a landscape worker who was hired to set stones into the staircase walls and steps as part of a contract with the city parks department.

The extensive ruins once belonged to a prominent private estate whose first owner was an early president of Washington Water Power Co. and whose second owner hosted a visit by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1903. The mansion was torn down in 1940. Now, as a public property, it is unique among historic gardens in Washington state.

For more than 60 years, its landscape retreated into a tangle of underbrush on the hillside below Cliff Drive, largely lost to modern-day residents. An elegant Rose Arbor Staircase in recent months had been tilting dangerously to one side, held up only by the trunk of a small tree.

“If that tree buckled, we were going to lose that whole wall,” said Lynn Mandyke, director of the Corbin Art Center on the grounds of Pioneer Park.

Spokane parks officials hired AM Landshaper Inc. of Spokane to save the staircase wall and re-set stone to its original sweeping forms under a $25,000 contract. Workers used boards and old-fashioned fence-building gear to slowly raise the staircase back into position.

Last weekend, vandals dismantled part of the work, a separate segment of staircase wall consisting of stacked rocks held in place by their weight. The vandals threw the top rows of rocks off into the brush, Mandyke said.

The city plans to put temporary fencing around the garden’s most sensitive ruins to protect them from further vandalism.

Mandyke also is planning an additional contract this summer to stabilize and protect an upper concrete pond and mortared stone columns that have also been under assault by vandals for years. The 60-foot-long pond was reportedly stocked with trout by U.S. Sen. George Turner, who also had been a judge.

Turner and his wife, Bertha, were said to have spent $10,000 in improvements to the landscape in 1911.

The grounds were part of a sweeping view property behind an 1889 Kirtland Cutter-designed mansion built for F. Rockwood Moore of Washington Water Power Co. The Turners acquired it in 1896 after Moore’s death, and in 1903 hosted the presidential visit.

Efforts to restore the gardens were launched in 1999 and have seen slow, steady progress. History of the site was documented, partly through photographs and records donated by Bertha Turner to Washington State University prior to her death.

The city has hired consultants to plan a restoration that would see some features rebuilt for public use while other ruins are left to help tell the history of the site.

Grants and assistance have come from the Spokane Parks Foundation, Spokane Preservation Advocates, Washington Heritage Capital Projects fund, Washington State Historical Society, National Trust for Historic Preservation and private foundations.

Separate landscape features at the rear of the adjacent Corbin House were rebuilt several years ago. Together, the two sites are known as the Corbin and Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens, and were placed on the Spokane Register of Historic Places.

A separate effort to have the Moore-Turner Garden listed on the National Register of Historic Places was rejected by the National Park Service last year, while the Corbin garden earned a national listing. The city has provided the park service with additional documentation on the Moore-Turner Garden in an effort to gain a national register listing for that part of the park.

“There’s a big question of the integrity of the garden,” said Michael Houser, architectural historian for the state’s Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. He said the listing may not be possible until the city restores significant portions of the Moore-Turner grounds.

But the Moore-Turner portion of the gardens has seen little restoration work until now, except for volunteer efforts to keep overgrowth and soil at bay.

“It’s such a good project, I don’t want to see it die,” said Joanne Moyer of the Spokane Preservation Advocates, which is hosting a work party at the site May 14. She said it could become a strong tourist attraction for people interested in history.

The project is not expected to be included in a park improvement bond issue now being planned for improvements to pools and other park features, officials said. Restoration could require hiring of additional staff in a parks department troubled by budget cuts in recent years.

The future of the project may rely on larger amounts of grants, gifts and fund-raising efforts, Mandyke said. The city currently may not be able to take full advantage of a $136,000 grant from the state historical society because local matching funds are required as a condition of the grant. As much as $70,000 is still available from the state if matching money can be raised.

“At least the features are protected and preserved until funds become available,” Mandyke said.