Expo '74: The World's Fair That Nobody Built in a Big City
Near Spokane, Washington
Spokane in the spring of nineteen seventy-four was a railroad town of one hundred seventy thousand people, the largest American city between Minneapolis and Seattle, and almost no one outside the region had heard of it. That May, it became the smallest city in history to host a World's Fair.
The fair ran from May fourth through November third, nineteen seventy-four, on about a hundred acres of former Northern Pacific Railway yards along the Spokane River falls. The railyard had been a source of industrial blight at the center of downtown for decades. The city cleared it, capped the contamination, and built a park. More than five point six million visitors came, with ten nations officially represented, to walk its grounds.
What made Expo seventy-four different from every World's Fair before or since was its theme. Not the machine, not the future, not atomic energy. The single declared theme of the nineteen seventy-four World's Fair was the environment. It was a radical choice for an American exposition in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, four years after the first Earth Day and the same year Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act. Nations that competed over missiles at every other exposition instead built exhibits about river restoration, air quality, and industrial pollution's cost to ordinary people.
The fair left the city a gift: Riverfront Park, which has anchored downtown Spokane ever since. The United States Pavilion's open lattice frame still stands on the site. The Spokane River falls cascade below it year-round, the same falls the Schitsu'umsh, the Spokane, and the Coeur d'Alene peoples had fished for thousands of years before the Northern Pacific arrived.
One hundred miles to the east, as Expo opened, the Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho, was operating without emission controls, and the children of the Silver Valley were getting their blood tested for lead.
