100 years ago in Spokane: Rival to Methodists’ Deaconess Hospital proposed by Lutherans

The Spokane Daily Chronicle ran an architectural drawing of a splendid new building planned for Spokane: the Evangelical Lutheran Deaconess Hospital.

Architect Harry C. Bertlesen had designed a main building which towered “six stories above the basement,” “modern in every way,” and fireproof. Two more wings, five stories tall, were planned in the second phase of the construction, with the completed building in an “H” shape.

“The exterior will be of stucco trimmed in brick and terra cotta with red tile roof,” said the Chronicle. “A sun parlor is to be located on top of the building. Besides the administration quarters and basement rooms, it will have space for more than 300 beds.”

You might assume that this would become Spokane’s new Deaconess Hospital building, today’s Multicare Deaconess Hospital. However, after more research, this drawing envisioned an entirely different Deaconess Hospital, one that would never be built.

The first hint came in the final line of the caption, which said, “The site will be decided later.”

This seemed odd, because Deaconess Hospital already had a long-established site on Fourth Avenue.

For another thing, the “deaconesses” behind the Fourth Avenue hospital were Methodist deaconesses, not Evangelical Lutheran deaconesses.

Finally, the Deaconess Hospital on Fourth Avenue had begun construction of a new building in 1919, but it was a 200-bed facility, designed by Kirtland Cutter and E.J. Baume. It would be finished in 1923 and still exists as part of the larger hospital campus on Fourth Avenue.

If the building envisioned had ever been built, Spokane would apparently have had two dueling Deaconess hospitals.