City Stories: Spokane

By J.A. O’Sullivan

Esquire this month named Baltimore as America’s next great underdog city. It was a distinction the magazine had previously given Katrina-torn New Orleans. Baltimore – once the nation’s fourth largest city, playground for The Wire — is an appropriate choice, as was its predecessor. Charm City and the Big Easy, two faded American icons, diminished port towns, touchstones that point back to our messy and dynamic and diverse evolution from baby nation to world powerhouse. Today, both cities grievingly portray our nation as it is: a confused behemoth struggling to adapt to the 21st century.

Underdogs have always given Americans a dream to lean our shoulders into. And with our current economic and psychological depression, we should nominate a few more underdogs, places to root for, to wish well. It’s not like we can’t others. Stab a map with your finger, you’ll find Youngstown or Providence or Las Vegas, cities rubbed raw with hardship.

And you’ll find Spokane.

Spokane, population 210,000, the biggest northern city between Seattle and Minneapolis, is my new home. I’ve lived here four months. There’s a lot I can’t tell you about Spokane: its block-by-block history, its hidden gems, its colorful characters, its local lore.

I can tell you what we don’t have. Spokane doesn’t have the academic polish of Boise, with its Idaho Anne Frank human rights memorial and Portland-lite aesthetics. We don’t have the Mormon-enforced cleanliness of downtown Salt Lake City. We can’t compete with the legend of Missoula’s wilderness playland. Compared to the starpower wattage of L.A. and San Fran Spokane is a footnote joke. And we struggle to match our sisters: the hipster treasure cove of Portland, the raw wealth and waterfront of Seattle. When those cities think of us, it’s probably rather as a cross-eyed country cousin.

Does the outside world even know we’re here? Even as newspapers decline, just about every state has at least one statewide daily. But the Seattle Times doesn’t deign to come to Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city. Closer home, our city boosters still bask in the distant glow of having hosted the 1974 World’s Fair, the smallest city until then.

As part of the fair, someone built a garbage-eating mechanical goat. Suction goat, still here, is a local favorite.

Like all the bigger cities, we’ve got our problems. Members of our city police force in 2006 killed an innocent civilian; the department has been accused of trying to cover it up. Our unemployment hovers around 8 percent and rarely goes much lower. Drifters and grifters ghost our city center, specters of hard times. In 2010, we ranked fourth highest in the nation in stolen cars. In the four months I’ve been here, vandals – we call them prowlers – have broken two of my car windows.

But forget troubles. For a writer, living here is heaven. Downtown is a visually arresting hub, a stately mishmash of grand early 20th-century buildings and old-line infrastructure: train trestles that split the city, bridges that stitch it together over the Spokane River. Trains lumber through downtown 24/7. Some lumber through carrying coal and shipping containers. When you’re especially lucky you’ll catch a flatbed rumbling by with supersize wind turbines or the bright green fuselages of Boeing aircraft. A constant hustle that speaks to the motion addict in me.

And I get to live right inside it, in a four-story apartment building comprised of studio apartments. When you look up – like I did for the first time only a couple weeks ago – you see my building wears subtly beautiful brick architecture like most others downtown. You don’t notice it because at some point someone came along and plastered the façade of our retail level a wan blue with a grotesque A-frame entrance constructed of wooden beams painted brightly blue. We sit on Riverside Avenue, our block a varicose vein on the edge of downtown’s spotty hustle and bustle. The retail space on our first floor has sat empty for at least six or seven years, at least as long as the current owner has been here, according to my landlady. Still, an improvement from 20 years ago. In those pictures, our downtown evokes bombed-out, graffiti-strewn ruins. A spooky flashback to the mass abandonment Americans undertook of our urban cores after World War II.

My apartment is cheap. Here, I walk to work, to the bars and restaurants and bookstores and cinemas, to the riverfront. It costs less than $400 a month. Try that on the coasts. Often, I think that I’ll get yuppie-uppity at some point about the drunks who spill from the two dive bars on my block. They scream me awake in the early morning and their puke washes across our sidewalk in chunks of pink and gold. But frustrate me it doesn’t. Our downtown is rowdy and chaotically vital and I like it. Spokane isn’t housebroken by wealth or educated culture, the cornerstones of modern conformity. Not stultified with the boring preoccupations of status.

The rest of Spokane, slowly opening to me, holds even more promise. The Spokane River, a gorgeous conduit that rumbles by downtown on one side and a rambling 100-acre park on the other. The gritty wonder of the reemerging Hillyard neighborhood. The fine old houses of South Hill. Outside of town, Mt. Spokane – or Spokane Mountain – I still mix it up. Spokanites share camaraderie of big-city envy, of shared paychecks or a lack thereof. We appreciate our downtown, which rivals cities twice our size. We can hop into a car and in short order drive into the austere hypnosis of the Palouse Valley, or past the pre-historically pristine lakes of Northern Idaho. And the natives here are friendly. As I put together the notes for this essay, I asked a server at South Perry Pizza for some change for laundry money. The cash register had no coins, so he fished some quarters out of his pocket and tossed them on my table. He left my dollars where they lay.

And while we’ve got our troubles, we’ve also got plenty of irons in the fire. We’re building a medical school that will help form a cohesive university district. Far from a bomb blast, our downtown now is on the verge of exerting gravitational force, pulling in people and ideas and commerce. I’m glad I’ll get a chance to see these bets unfold.

I’m glad I moved here.

In that spirit, I nominate Spokane as America’s underdog city of the West. Spokane, which in the language of its founders, the eponymous Indian tribe, means “Children of the Sun.”

It’s a good name for a struggling city, the keep-your-head-up kind of reminder that every underdog needs to hear. It’s a blessing I’ll take any day.

J.A. O’Sullivan is a journalist and fiction writer. Check out more of his work at Speed the Pilgrim.

(This is the first in our City Stories Series.

Interested in writing about a city you grew up in, live in or have visited?

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