For her next fiction work, author Carla Crujido seeks true tales of the Crescent Department Store

A woman descended on the Crescent Department store escalator in the early 1960s. Her stiletto heel got stuck in the mechanism at the very bottom.

“She stepped out of her shoe, and she was so shy, she just kept walking,” said “The Strange Beautiful” author Carla Crujido. “And my dad, who had been watching her come down the escalator, she caught his eye. He grabbed her shoe and put it back on her foot. So, it was a very Cinderella moment.”

This is the story of how Carla Crujido’s parents met. This story drew “The Strange Beautiful” author to the building, compelling her to search for more of its stories. But, she was quickly met with dead ends. For a building with such a prominent space in downtown Spokane, Crujido was able to find surprisingly little.

“When I got into the archives at (the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture) and the library, I found that this 100-year history of the Crescent Department Store has been all but lost,” Crujido said. “There is a book called ‘Under the Clock’ that was written over 20 years ago. It’s a wonderful oral history, but the actual records from the department store no longer exist.

“MAC has a few photographs. There’s a small file at the Inland Northwest Special Collections at the library. I really started to think about that and how it was so iconic. It was in the city for 99 years, and its history has all but disappeared, except in people’s memories.”

Crujido added The Spokesman-Review archives also had ephemera such as Crescent advertisements.

Growing up, Crujido’s family moved around frequently, due to her dad’s job as a nuclear engineer. But Crujido felt rooted to the Inland Northwest because her grandma lived in Priest River, and she would spend her summers there.

“Our days in the city were spent in Spokane,” Crujido said. “And so that’s why it’s such an important place to me.”

“The Strange Beautiful” is a collection of short stories that take place in an apartment building on the South Hill, and span from 1914 to present day. The stories are firmly rooted in place, yet surreal in nature – “my stories are pretty Twilight Zone-ish.”

Now, Crujido plans to give the Crescent similar treatment, including the story of her parents meeting. And she wants help … from Spokane.

“What I would love to see happen is for the community to write letters with their memories of the Crescent,” Crujido said. “Whether they worked at the Crescent, or they were customers, or maybe their memory is just looking at the Christmas windows when they were children. Whatever the memory is, I would love for them to write letters to me, and I’ll collect them. I’ll read them all. I’ll use them for inspiration and flavor and texture for the stories.”

The Spokesman-Review will then print these Crescent letters so that the entire city can share this history.

“It just becomes this community project,” Crujido said. “And that is one reason that I love Spokane so much, and the literary community there, and my readership there. It’s unlike any other place that I’ve ever encountered. And I just would love for this to almost … I mean, I’m the writer, but to just be a community project, even though it’s fiction.”