Spokane Riverfront Park: What Expo '74 Left Behind

The nineteen seventy-four World's Fair lasted six months and then ended, as all World's Fairs do, with the last visitors walking out through the gates in November and the buildings being assessed for what to keep and what to tear down. What Spokane kept became Riverfront Park, and Riverfront Park has anchored the city's downtown for the fifty years since.

The hundred-acre site along the Spokane River falls had been, for decades before the fair, the operational yard of the Northern Pacific Railway, a working industrial space that sat between the city's commercial core and the river it effectively ignored. The fair cleared the yard, cleaned the soil, built the exhibition pavilions on top of it, and then handed the city a park when the pavilions came down. The exchange was not without its ambiguities: the rail infrastructure that had made Spokane the commercial capital of the Inland Empire was cleared away to make room for a fair whose declared theme was the environment.

The United States Pavilion frame, an open lattice structure, remains standing on the site as an outdoor amphitheater. The Spokane River falls, which the Northern Pacific had hidden behind its industrial works for decades, cascade through the center of the park year-round. The Spokane Falls have been the site of Schitsu'umsh and Spokane Tribe salmon fisheries for thousands of years.

The park is now the standard lens through which Spokane's civic identity is narrated: the city that transformed itself through an environmental World's Fair. The Bunker Hill smelter, which was running without emission controls a hundred miles to the east while the fair ran, is not typically included in that narration.