Editorial: Make room for worthy Marketplace successors

Eighteen summers ago, when the Spokane Marketplace opened at Riverside and Division, it was considered part of a revitalization movement at the east end of town, an area described by a reporter at the time as “a neighborhood of run-down warehouses, weedy lots and wandering transients.”

But the farmers market quickly became a hit, and operators were eager to dress it up. The warehouses on the site were thought to be ideal for the community’s hopes of emulating Seattle’s decades-old Pike Place Market – potentially. But the structures, the wiring, the plumbing all needed serious work, and that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more than $1 million.

Fundraising efforts never really clicked, but in its four-year run at that location, Marketplace participation continued to grow and the ranks of patrons swelled: 63 vendors and 17,000 customers in 1991; 200 vendors and 300,000 customers in 2004.

Success was possible in part because the Spokane Marketplace got a $10-a-year lease from the city, which owned the property, and later the state, which acquired it for higher-education purposes. But in 1994, with market managers already talking about needing to find a bigger and better location, the state gave notice that it couldn’t come back in 1995.

Grudgingly, the Spokane Marketplace departed, relocating in a series of temporary homes but never replicating the popularity it achieved at Riverside and Division.

The warehouses remain, however, still run-down and still occupying land for which the state has higher-education plans.

In the intervening years, eye-opening change has occurred on the adjacent land, where a higher-education district is taking shape, part of a vision for an economic future linking health care and higher education. Among other features, plans call for an extension of Riverside Avenue so vehicular traffic will have a convenient east-west route without intruding on pedestrian-friendly campus activity. To accommodate the extension, planners have concluded, the warehouses have to come down.

It would have been a splendid thing for Spokane if the Spokane Marketplace had never vacated the site, if it had secured the funds to update the buildings and if that element of civic vitality were still a part of the evolving University District.

But that didn’t happen and the opportunity has passed. Other plans have overtaken it, plans that are healthy and promising for Spokane in their own way.

Some historic preservationists now oppose demolition of the still-run-down warehouses, remembering the frustration that accompanied the demise of the Rookery block, which gave way to an unneeded surface parking lot in downtown Spokane. The aging structures at Riverside and Division are no Rookery block, no Davenport Hotel, no Fox Theater. They are in the way.

There are times when marching into the future demands holding on to aspects of the past. This isn’t one of those times. The historic preservationists’ reverence for Spokane and its quality of life is admirable, but their energy should be directed at more suitable projects.