New town center on Valley wish list

The kids in the Solar Energy choir make lighting Spokane Valley’s Christmas tree look so easy.

Gathered beneath its dark branches in the parking lot of the mostly vacant University City Shopping Center, they sing jazzy songs, soulful songs, even boogie-woogie until the lights seemingly respond like embers to their steaming breath. They even summon Santa Claus, who rolls up in what can only be described as St. Nick’s version of the Popemobile, a delivery truck with living-room sized windows cut into its sides for full visibility of the Velveteen One.

Candy canes are handed out to all, and children eager to bypass their parents and speak directly to the man step forward, but the mall – 20 years ago the heart of the city – stays cold in the background.

There is a feeling in the Valley that when the mall died several years ago, the city lost its soul, or at least its center, the place along Sprague Avenue where the community gathered for all its holidays.

As Mayor Diana Wilhite put it after the tree lighting, “there’s no sense of ‘here’ ” – no genuine center of town for residents to call their own. As the kids packed up their Santa hats and headed home, the adults put their heads together to talk about a real concern, that a community with no place to gather really isn’t a community, just a group of strangers that each night after work just happen to drive to the same corner of the county to sleep. They laid plans for building a town center. In a season of presents and wish lists, few could be bigger.

A town center would likely include a City Hall, as well as the public library and an outdoor common area for community events, all surrounded by offices and retail shops. Both the city and the Spokane County Library District see new buildings in the next 10 years. Though a site hasn’t been officially selected, consultants hired by the city are working as if the town center were just east of University City Shopping Center.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for U-City among Spokane Valley natives old enough to remember when it was the kind of community hub leaders now envision.

The shopping center not only anchored Sprague Avenue when City Councilman Mike DeVleming was a boy in the 1960s, but was also the center of community events. Even less than half occupied, U-City is still where the community’s only parade comes to an end. It’s where DeVleming chose to launch the “Festival of Lights” tree lighting tradition four years ago. Ironically, DeVleming found the 30-foot artificial festival tree on sale after a mall ordered it, but canceled. He senses the community is ready for a town center.

“The nice thing is, there’s so little resistance to what we’re trying to do,” DeVleming said.

Karen Creighton is sold on the idea.

Standing outside the empty shell of U-City last Thursday, Creighton would have settled for a warm coffee shop where she could sit with friend Kendra Grabowski for a cup of hot joe while their children assembled to sing on the sidewalk outside before the Christmas tree lighting. Bathrooms would have been a plus.

Creighton knows what a town center feels like. She can sense it when she travels to downtown Spokane for a community event. It’s the feeling of familiarity one gets standing in the crowd at the Lilac Parade, or amid the sneaker-clad mob at the Bloomsday starting line. The Spokane Valley resident suspects there’s even more to experience when the town center in which you’re gathered is your own, and you can look around and see your neighbors.

Grabowski was ready to move the entire event to the mall of the moment, the Spokane Valley Mall, on the northern shoulder of Interstate 90. “If it was at the mall, there would be people walking by who would stop,” Grabowski said.

As it was, the songs the children sang hung briefly in the air before disappearing, largely unnoticed, into the cold darkness.