This day in history: Police cracked down on teenage Riverside cruisers, and a ‘chicken palace’ made headlines

From 1975: Spokane police declared war on a time-honored Spokane teenage tradition: “dragging” or “tooling” Riverside Avenue.

By 1 a.m., police had arrested at least 30 teens for beer drinking or disorderly conduct, and another 100 on traffic violations. Nine additional jailers were put on duty to handle the influx.

“We’re going to regain control of Riverside from these kids who go downtown on weekend nights and violate the law,” a traffic task force commander said.

One teen, sitting on a hood of a car said, “There are more cops than there are cars down here.”

Police said that noise and congestion were the main problems, as teen drivers inched “from stoplight to stoplight.” But in recent weeks, the situation had become out of hand, with people throwing rocks through store windows and throwing beer bottles at traffic officers. Beer seemed to fuel most of the problems.

Cruising Riverside was nothing new in 1975. One 18-year-old girl told a reporter that her mother used to do the same thing.

From 1925: Oscar Miller of Spokane had designed a startling structure: a “Chicken Palace.”

Chicken Palace?

At least, it looked like that compared to the average chicken house.

It was built in two 8-by-8 sections, one being the scratch pen and the other he called “the chicken’s living room.”

It was built of cedar and contained seven nests. The “living room” had a three-way ventilating system and a removable straw loft. It was on display at the Home Lumber Co.

A Spokane chicken raiser declared the Chicken Palace to be “well-adapted to the back lot poultryman.”

Miller was also the inventor of a “sanitary hog house.”