Early east central Spokane apartment revived

The Rose-Kly-Cecil Apartments at 1726 E. Third Ave. is a pretty, little structure in a part of the East Central Neighborhood that is no longer considered very pretty.

It faces Interstate 90 just west of the Altamont exit, and also two lanes of one-way street traffic zooming by just out front – a far cry from its early days as a multifamily living structure in Spokane’s quiet eastern suburban area.

When it was built in 1910, it was one of only two brick-clad apartment structures in what was known as the Union Park Addition, bounded by Sprague and 14th avenues and Division and Havana streets. It was the only one of the two built just for housing, as the other one also had storefront space.

In 1900, stonemason and engineer Michael Hunz, who was employed at a nearby brewery, moved his family into a small house he built himself on a lot at 1728 E. Third Ave. The neighborhood was filled with single-family dwellings that housed the families of those who worked in nearby lumber, flour and sawmills. In 1904, he purchased the lot next door for $1,075 and built the two-story structure in the Colonial Revival style with Italianate influences. It contained living units for four families, and when it was completed in 1910 he called it the Rose Apartments in honor of his daughter Rose Marie Hunz.

The building was sold several times in the next few decades. In 1943, Charles and Gertrude Kly bought the property and changed the name to the Kly Apartments and remodeled it to accommodate eight small apartments. In 1949 George Dittmer, a technician at Sandberg Dental Laboratory, purchased it and changed the name to the Cecil Apartments, for his wife, Cecil Dittmer.

By the 1950s nearby Sprague Avenue had become so congested with traffic that plans went into constructing a high-speed expressway, which in 1970 resulted in I-90 bisecting the area with a multilane freeway between Second and Third avenues – changing the nature of the neighborhood entirely. This left the Rose-Kly-Cecil Apartments facing this impenetrable new barrier that separated it from anything north of it.

Jerry Numbers, who has been involved with development and preservation projects in the East Central Neighborhood since the 1970s, said he had watched the building going downhill for years. It was eventually boarded up, derelict and vandalized. In 2009, the city of Spokane purchased it at foreclosure and turned it over to the East Central Community Organization, the nonprofit funding arm of the East Central Community Center.

“Boy, it was in bad shape,” said Numbers, an ECCO board member. “The bricks were falling off the back wall, which was bulging because of the roof leaking. Plaster was cracking and falling. Interior plumbing had been stolen. Windows were broken. No way was it habitable.”

Sleeves were rolled up, the building gutted, lead and asbestos abatement done and the entire interior rebuilt. The glass skylight over the second-floor hallway, which appears to be original, remains. And, of course, the exterior was also repaired, restored and upgraded. Numbers said $75,000 worth of windows – authentic in style to the original – were put in, and in fact, “the Rose looks like it did when it was first built.”

But there was another issue to deal with in rehabbing the building. Originally it had been slated by the Washington Department of Transportation for demolition to make way for freeway expansion, but another look at homes in the area in 2003 resulted in the Rose being identified for saving, but it would have to be moved – eventually.

“So we needed to do everything to prepare it so it could be moved, including, for example, ensuring that the exterior brick walls were screwed into the interior studs,” Numbers said.

And where it will move, when the time comes, will be about 150 feet east and 100 feet south, to Pittsburg Street and Fourth Avenue, on land already owned by the group and where a community garden now grows. “We’re ready for it,” Numbers said, “but who knows how long it will be before that happens.”

Meantime, the eight one-bedroom, low-income apartments at the Rose-Kly-Cecil Apartments will stay put in the lovely red-brick building that in 2010 earned its place on the Spokane Register of Historic Places.