Getting There: East Central residents invited to share input on North Spokane Corridor, I-90 interchange aesthetics

Residents of the East Central Neighborhood will have the opportunity to shape what the long-awaited North Spokane Corridor connections to Interstate 90 will look like at a town hall hosted by the Washington State Department of Transportation.

With the target completion date for the decadeslong project approaching, the state Transportation Department is seeking feedback on the artistic and architectural elements of the freeway-interstate connections at a community discussion at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Nuestras Raíces Centro Comunitario, 1214 E. Sprague Ave. For those who can’t make it to the East Sprague Avenue location, a virtual option to attend will be available.

Department spokesman Joe McHale said the layout of where the various connections will go has already been decided, and the event will provide Spokane residents the chance to help nail down the aesthetics of those connections.

The department is seeking input due in part to the historic impacts the project has had on the neighborhood, McHale said. The Transportation Department has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring hundreds of homes along the interchange’s projected path since the start of the century. That displacement came after the neighborhood was already divided by I-90 decades prior.

“While we can’t necessarily fix that, we can honor that community,” McHale said. So we wanted to give people who live in the East Central community a say in what the artistic features along the North Spokane Corridor and connection to I-90 will look like, in an effort to honor the heritage and look toward the future.”

The Department of Transportation has broken the interchange’s construction, the last step in completing the corridor, into four phases. Crews are expected to break ground on the first phase, which will involve local connections and ramp structures between Hamilton and Thor streets in spring 2026. Later that year, the second phase will begin with the construction of the interchange to I-90.

The third phase will create a “Freya Street to Sprague Avenue interchange, local street connections and ramp structures” and is expected to start in late 2026 or early 2027, according to the project’s webpage. The decadeslong project will wrap up with the completion of the freeway-interstate interchange, with construction of the final phase scheduled to start in spring 2027.

At similar town halls over the past few months, East Central residents helped the department identify key themes that reflect and represent the neighborhood, which Spokane-based artist Reinaldo Gil Zambrano used to inform his designs for the project’s aesthetics. The public will help narrow down the different design variations to a final eight at Wednesday’s discussion, McHale said.

“We’re asking the community to share their input to make sure that the imagery does reflect the history, the diversity and the character of the East Central Neighborhood,” McHale said. “It’s a collaborative effort.”

If residents are unable to attend Wednesday’s event in-person or virtually, they can look forward to one more community discussion next month that will recap the past six months of engagement events that began last fall. McHale said that town hall will take place at 5:30 p.m. May 21 at the Liberty Park branch of the Spokane Public Library.

“We’ll kind of put a bow tie on that, and hopefully we’ll schedule more in the future,” McHale said.