Light rail
The ongoing proposal to build a light rail commuter line from downtown Spokane to Liberty Lake has raised the question: Will it encourage rampant development along the Spokane Valley corridor?
I can’t answer that, nor can I answer whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing.
However, from a historical point of view, I can say this emphatically: Rampant development along light-rail lines built this city.
Except they weren’t called light-rail lines. They were called “trolleys,” “streetcars” and “interurban lines.”
In Spokane’s formative decades – the 1880s and 1890s –real estate developers had a problem when it came to housing Spokane’s exploding population. People wouldn’t buy a house too far from downtown.
When your only options were either going on foot or saddling up old Trigger, even a mile or two seemed too far.
So in 1888, a group of investors, including John J. Browne, decided to start a posh new housing development west of the city. They knew, however, that nobody would buy a lot without a quick way to get into town.
So the investors built the Spokane Street Railway Co. – the city’s first streetcar line – which went right through their housing development and back.
The line was an essential part of the marketing plan, and sales took off.
They called their housing development Browne’s Addition and it did quite well.
This same pattern was soon repeated all over the city, with developments named Ross Park, east of downtown; Arlington Heights, north of downtown; and the Cable Addition, straight up the South Hill.
The latter was served, naturally, by a fancy new cable car line.
The real estate developers soon found the streetcar business to be more than they bargained for, and most sold out to larger citywide streetcar lines.
But the lines continued to fulfill their original purpose. They made it possible to sell houses in an ever-increasing arc around the city.
Would a new light-rail system create a new boom along its corridor? Would it bring back the old dynamic?
That’s hardly a given in this automobile-dominated age.
But if so, it would have a certain historical harmony.
(Much of the above information came from “Spokane’s Street Railways,” by Chas. H. Mutschler, Clyde L. Parent and Wilmer H. Siegert.)
The Lewis and Clark Report: On this date 200 years ago, the Lewis and Clark expedition had arrived at a long anticipated spot: Three Forks, Mont.
That’s where three smaller streams come together to form the mighty Missouri.
Since all three streams were about the same size, it caused a naming problem for the two leaders.
None of the branches seemed worthy of being called the Missouri.
So Lewis and Clark gave them three new names.
“We called the S.W. fork … Jefferson’s River in honor of that illustrious personage Thomas Jefferson, the author of our enterprise,” wrote Meriwether Lewis on July 28, 1805. “The Middle fork we called Madison’s River, in honor of James Madison and the S.E. fork we called Gallatin’s River in honor of Albert Gallatin (the Secretary of Treasury at the time).”
That’s why the Missouri today begins rather abruptly beneath I-90, and not, for instance, way up in the forests of Yellowstone National Park, where the Gallatin and Madison rise.
The History Report: Check out these author presentations at the Kress Gallery on the third level of River Park Square, both connected to the mall’s current “Discovering the Rivers of Lewis and Clark” exhibit.
On Aug. 11 at 7 p.m., Spokane author Jack Nisbet will discuss explorer David Thompson, who came to this region shortly after Lewis and Clark. Gonzaga University professor Robert Carriker will discuss expedition member John Ordway’s foray up the Salmon River.
On Aug. 17 at 7 p.m., Paul Vandevelder will discuss “What Happens to Cultures When Rivers Die.”
Both presentations are free.
100 years ago this week: A tiny item in the July 29, 1905, edition of The Spokesman-Review was a harbinger of a huge change.
A Pendleton wheat farmer reported that he had attached a gasoline engine to his wheat combine, which normally required a team of 30 horses to run.
With the engine, he had cut 80 acres in two and a half days and “expects to cut at least 40 acres of grain a day when more familiar with the machine.”
He pronounced it a “success in every way.”
Meanwhile, another S-R story that week proved that people will always be susceptible to a get-rich-quick scheme.
A Spokane man named Joseph Rossi somehow convinced several well-heeled local businessmen that he was actually an Italian duke with a $125 million legacy waiting for him in Italy.
They staked him to some money to help him retrieve his legacy, and two of them even accompanied him by train to the Italian embassy in Washington, D.C.
There, the ambassador informed the two businessmen that there was no such dukedom and that Rossi was “mentally deranged.”
One of the businessmen later admitted that he had been taken for “about $2,000,” although he also pointed out that “I got to see the country, so I got something for my money.”
Substitute “Nigerian general” for “Italian duke,” and it all sounds very modern.