American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, The Fair and the Falls: Spokane’s Expo ’74: Transforming an American Environment, Chapter   
                    "Ariel View of Spokane, 1950" courtesy of the Washington State Archives

Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal

Picture
Great Northern Train in Spokane

Summary

By the mid-1950s downtown Spokane was in trouble. A number of factors contributed to this decline: the closure of Fairchild Air Force Base, the growth of suburban shopping malls, and the depressing atmosphere in its decaying center. A group of businessmen formed Spokane Unlimited to combat this slide. They hired Ebasco to provide a plan for their efforts, sponsored a reform of municipal government, and backed two bond issues (1962 and 1963) which would have raised money for urban renewal. Spokanites, however, remained skeptical about the wisdom of government intervention in their downtown and of the motivations of businessmen who were so eager to renew it.

Author reads from the Text

"Corrective surgery"

The Ebasco report read: "A city's vitality depends upon whether its heart continues to function efficiently. The heart of a city is its downtown. The continued vitality of Spokane's central business district will depend on acceptance of the need for corrective surgery now. Mere application of salves in the form of such...measures as clean-up, paint-up and patch-up campaigns will only result in a later, and more urgent, call for major surgery."

"Paving over the river"

"The Ebasco planners recognized the inherent beauty of the falls and advocated "recapturing the beauty and attractiveness of the central business district's natural setting." Many Spokanites had forgotten that the river was there. There had even been talk of paving over the south channel of the river to provide more parking space. As outlandish as that idea might seem a few years later, it was not out of the question in the 1950s: other channels of the river had already been filled in to enhance the river's power-generating capabilities. So why not build over more of the river for parking?"

"A heritage of natural beauty"

"Dorothy Powers, one of the paper's best writers, wrote a feature article about the citizens' choice -- to beautify or to neglect their cities. Spokane had a chance to be the lovely place nature had made her, 'Or -- she can ignore her legacy of beauty and individuality, and become an anonymous field of asphalt and concrete, ugly cousin to thousands of indistinguishable cities elsewhere. Spokane can make that choice now....Who decides such things in a city's life? Her people.' In a passage reminiscent of Spokane's pioneer boosters, Powers argued that Spokane had 'a heritage of natural beauty surpassed by few cities in the world.' Who else could boast 'a river splashing gloriously through the downtown?' She reminded Spokane that early planners such as Aubrey White had worked to preserve their city's natural beauty. Modern Spokanites should do the same."



Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
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Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City