Then and Now: Spokane Coliseum

Metropolitan Opera soprano Patrice Munsel and the Spokane Philharmonic opened the new Spokane Coliseum in December 1954.

Munsel grew up in Spokane but left at age 15 to study music in New York. After a 1943 audition, she became the youngest star of the Met stage.

Munsel’s stardom illuminated the opera world, the Broadway stage and early television. In 1957 and 1958, she hosted the Patrice Munsel Show on television. Munsel was 91 when she died in 2016 at her home in New York.

City boosters had been talking about building a civic auditorium as early as 1912, the year Spokane’s population surpassed 100,000 people. There were theaters and high school auditoriums but nowhere thousands could gather indoors.

Public ownership of an entertainment venue was debated. For many years, the largest indoor venue in Spokane was the National Guard Armory and the acoustics were poor. A new building would cost at least $500,000, more than any politician wanted to spend without a public vote.

The first proposal was for a theater at the county fairgrounds. Put to a public vote in 1931, it was soundly defeated.

In the late 1930s, an independent auditorium board was formed. As World War II ended, the campaign began anew.

“A municipal auditorium has reached the position of American communal life of being a civic necessity,” E.S. Hennessey of the auditorium committee wrote in 1945. He said the building could host concerts, lectures, stage shows, boxing, wrestling, basketball, horse shows, circuses, scout jamborees, roller derbies, ice hockey, conventions and more.

The vote failed in 1948 but passed in 1953. The bond supplied $2 million, and donors, mostly clubs and lodges, added $500,000. Emma Rue, the daughter of pioneer Col. David Jenkins, donated a field at Boone Avenue and Howard Street. Builders used 8,500 yards of concrete and 750 tons of steel.

The new venue often hosted various forms of entertainment, religious services, and hockey and basketball games . The Coliseum seated 8,500 people but only about 6,000 for hockey and other sports events. Over the years, Jimi Hendrix, Lawrence Welk, Elvis Presley and other acts played at the “Boone Street Barn.”

The building was replaced in 1995 with the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena, now called the Numerica Veterans Arena, which is operated by the Spokane Public Facilities District.