This photo, dated circa 1901, was shot from the tower of the Spokane County Courthouse looking east. Prominent in the center middle distance is the peaked roof of the Galland-Burke Brewing Company on the southeast corner of Broadway and Lincoln.
In 1925, Native Americans from the Spokane region met in a large Indian Congress. The tribes set up tents and tepees in the Peaceful Valley area of downtown Spokane.
The Montgomery Ward building, designed by the department store’s team from Chicago, was built in 1929 and brought an elegance to shopping in downtown Spokane.
Doerr-Mitchell and Company, selling electrical and radio supplies, opened in Spokane in 1897. Although it moved from the Howard St. location early on, business grew rapidly.
A century ago, the elk population in Spokane was booming. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, commonly known as the Elks Club, had almost 8000 members in Spokane, rivaling the largest groups in the country.
The Opportunity Township hall, a Spanish colonial-style building at 12114 E. Sprague, turns 100 years old this year and its current occupant, the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum, will celebrate the centennial on Sept. 20 at 5 p.m. with a short program and the burial of a time capsule.
Until the 1960s, the waterfront in Coeur d’Alene served as a steamboat landing, a lumber mill, a sea plane dock, a train yard, an area of industrial warehouses and a log storage area. In the 1960s, the transformation to a tourist destination began in earnest.
James “Cashup” Davis, born in England in 1815, came to America 1840 to seek his fortune. His early success in the hospitality business led him to dream of a hotel perched atop Steptoe Butte, a rocky hill in the middle of the Palouse.
Spokane's downtown had everything. From its founding in the 1870s to the end of its industrial boom in 1910, people came downtown by streetcar, then buses, for groceries, hardware, clothing, doctor appointments and restaurants.
The 1955 photo shows a city in transition. By some measures, the post-WWII economy was still slowing following the vigorous expansion of early Spokane, circa 1890 to 1910. Although Spokane was the economic and industrial center of the region, its proud skyline, with the Paulsen Medical and Dental Building and the Old National Bank building seemed sculpted in another era. Trains still trundled in and out of the area around Spokane Falls, but transportation was changing as the automobile offered a new freedom. In just a few years, the idea for a world's fair to revitalize downtown would take hold and the rails and train depots of old Spokane were swept away for Expo '74. The shoreline of the Spokane River was recontoured. Many structures from Expo are still in use, like the Washington State Pavilion, a gleaming modern theater which would become the INB Performing Arts Center.
President William Howard Taft loved good food and there was no shortage of it during his visit to Spokane in 1909, which coincided with the National Apple Show.
In the days before refrigerators, beer had to be made locally, often in the back of a saloon where it was sold. One of the first big breweries in Spokane was the New York Brewery, which opened in 1886 on the northwest corner of Washington and Front St., now called Spokane Falls Blvd.
The Rex Theater, decorated with an elaborate rococo plaster facade, opened at 326 W. Riverside around 1908 as the Empire Theater offering light opera, vaudeville shows and first-run silent movies in the midst of Spokane's bustling boom years.
