Peaceful Valley: Poverty Flats to Bohemia

If you drive down into the bowl of land just west of downtown where the Spokane River bends south along the basalt cliffs, you are entering one of the city's oldest and most quietly interesting neighborhoods. Today it is called Peaceful Valley. For most of its history it was called Poverty Flats.

This land was the site of some of the Spokane Tribe's most important fishing camps near the Lower Falls of the river. After Euro-American settlement, it was claimed by squatters who could not afford the elevated lots where Spokane's wealthier residents were building. In eighteen ninety-one landowners cleared the squatters out, and a developer platted the lots, renamed the area Peaceful Valley, and marketed it to working-class families. It became the center of Spokane's Finnish immigrant community in the early twentieth century. Modest wooden houses were built close together on the narrow flat between the river and the cliff face.

The neighborhood's defining challenge has always been water. It sits in a floodplain. High-water years brought the Spokane River into living rooms and onto streets. The flooding kept property values low and the neighborhood accessible to those the rest of the city did not much accommodate: artists, laborers, Finnish fishermen, and later the Wobblies who drifted in and out of Spokane's labor scene.

That combination of geographic isolation and economic marginality produced, over time, a neighborhood with a distinct character. Peaceful Valley became Spokane's bohemian quarter: close to downtown, separated from it by a canyon, affordable in a way that few neighborhoods near city centers remain. The historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places preserves much of the original housing stock. The steep road down from Maple Street is still the only easy way in or out.