Then and Now: Pedicord Hotel

Thomas J. Pedicord, born in 1859 in Ohio and raised in Iowa, arrived in Spokane in 1889. He’d been a deputy county clerk, a schoolteacher and a businessman in retail stores, the last of which he continued to pursue in Spokane.

In 1895, he took over the Gillette Hotel, first built by millionaire F. Lewis Clark in 1893. It was one of the few hotels that were designed for short stays rather than weekly or monthly rentals. The new Pedicord Hotel advertised hot and cold running water and “Medical Lake baths,” presumably those made with residue from the lake, believed to have healing qualities. “The only first-class house in Spokane charging moderate rates,” hotel advertisements said.

Pedicord expanded the 78-room house to 165, and the building on Riverside spanned the block to Sprague Avenue. The Sprague side was a low-rise garage for residents.

Except for when Pedicord took a couple of years off to go to work in the Idaho mines, he ran the hotel until he died in 1916 at the age of 57. Minnie Pedicord, his widow, sold the hotel a few years later and spent her retirement in Los Angeles and Honolulu.

The next several decades took a toll on the old building, which continued as a hotel until the mid-1970s. In the late 1970s, it was dingy and dark, housing the poorest of Spokane’s downtown denizens in monthly rentals.

Just before the building was torn down in the early 1980s, demolition operator Louis Ray allowed well-known installation artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz inside the dark corridors to glean items for their sculptures, which often expressed isolation and despair. The Kienholzes were struck by the sadness of tiny rooms and lonely tenants who had to move out.

From those visits and items they found, the couple created one of their most famous pieces, titled “Sollie 17.” When fully assembled in a museum, viewers appear to walk down a seedy hotel corridor where one door is ajar, allowing a voyeuristic peek at an old man lounging in his underwear in a hotel bedroom.

Ed Kienholz died in 1994. And though the Pedicord Hotel is gone, “Sollie 17” remains in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.