Jesse Tinsley

Spokane Dry Goods, later renamed The Crescent, opened in 1889 and grew rapidly. Around 1899, the store moved to the 700 block of Main Avenue and connected to a new three-story block facing Riverside. Advertisements in the early 1900s proclaimed The Crescent as “Spokane’s Greatest Store.”

The renamed Spokane Technical and Vocational School opened a campus at 3403 E. Mission Ave. in 1958. Separate construction at the former Fort George Wright campus followed in the 1960s. The two schools became separate colleges in 1970.

The water treatment facility on the west side of town was completed in 1958 and has been upgraded throughout its history to treat sewage at ever-increasing environmental standards.

Once a destination where shoppers would pick up bulky or obscure items, the former warehouse is not the home of the Washington State University Spokane bookstore in the University District.

The Downriver bridge opened in 1928, replacing at least two former bridges on the site that were inadequate for traffic to the nearby Army base. The current span, the T.J. Meenach Bridge, was completed in 1994.

Robert E. Strahorn earned his nickname “the sphinx” because unlike other railroad boosters of his day, the man said little of his plans. Strahorn organized the construction of the Union Station, which opened Sept. 14, 1914.

West End Drug store was a fixture at West First Avenue and Monroe Street from 1927 to 1965.

Roy L. Stone built, and rebuilt, chains of grocery and drug stores in the region from the 1920s through the 1960s. That included the Low Cost Food Market, which opened with a large location at Division and Baldwin in Spokane.

Opened in October 1891, the 10-story, 146-foot tower at the corner of Riverside Avenue and Monroe Street nearly put the publishers of the Review out of business, financially. William H. Cowles, the 24-year-old son of an executive at the Chicago Tribune, proposed a merger with his Spokesman newspaper.

Built in 1912, Old City Hall was actually the second permanent home for city offices after a building in Riverfront Park was sold to the railroads for $352,000. When it opened, Mayor W.J. Hindley promised that the structure at the corner of Spokane Falls Boulevard and Wall Street would be a temporary home for city offices until a more grand structure could be built. City operations remained headquartered there for another 70 years.

The city built the concrete East Olive Avenue Bridge, now the East Trent Bridge, with city laborers and completed it in 1910 for more than $100,000.

Much of Spokane’s downtown railroad and industrial infrastructure was removed in preparation for Expo ’74. But some areas weren’t ready for redevelopment until after Spokane’s big moment on the world stage.

The Thomas S. Foley United States Courthouse was originally envisioned as a joint federal and municipal building, but voters failed to pass a $10.4 million bond to combine the two governmental buildings.

The Jensen-Byrd warehouse on Main Avenue was first built as a storage facility for the Marshall-Wells Company in 1909. Today, it’s part of the WSU campus in the University District.

A tale of two neighbors: The Granite Block was the result of a massive rebuild after the Great Fire of 1889; the Paulsen Building had roots in the sudden wealth of a man who struck it rich in mining.

The first Great Northern train rolled into Spokane in May 1892, starting a long association between the company and the city. James Jerome Hill, one of the great rail tycoons of the 19th century, put a massive rail yard outside Spokane city limits that would become the biggest rail shop west of the Mississippi. The Hillyard shops produced the most powerful steam engine of the time, the R-1 Mallet.

Rosa D. Malone arrived in Spokane as a Works Progress Administration supervisor and founded the Booker T. Washington Community Center in the basement of Calvary Baptist Church in 1937.

Bob Strahorn planned the downtown Spokane Union Station, opened in 1914, to compete with the Great Northern depot, built in 1902.

The first Monroe Street bridge, built by Spokane Cable Railway and partners, cost $42,000 and opened in 1889. Two other iterations followed, the last being the concrete bridge we see today, with four small pavilions designed by Kirtland Cutter.

There was an era in Spokane when women dressed fashionably to shop downtown. Suits, dresses, hats and smartly tailored coats, often trimmed in fur, were important accessories.