The Great Fire and the Brick City
Near Spokane, Washington
On the evening of August fourth, eighteen eighty-nine, a fire most likely started in a small lunch counter across from the Northern Pacific depot on Railroad Avenue. Within hours, it had consumed thirty-two city blocks. Virtually the entire downtown of Spokane Falls was gone.
The Great Spokane Fire of eighteen eighty-nine was not unusual in this respect. Dozens of American cities built from wood experienced catastrophic fires in the nineteenth century. What made Spokane's response remarkable was its speed and its ambition. Property losses were estimated between five and ten million dollars, an enormous sum for the time, with somewhere between half and two thirds of it insured. Investors and banks moved immediately. Before the ash had cooled, businessmen were already financing reconstruction in brick and stone.
By the end of eighteen eighty-nine, the city's own board of trade reported that five hundred buildings were under construction within the fire limits, almost all of them three to seven stories high, built from materials that would not burn again. The city also used the fire as an opportunity to redesign how it protected itself. It installed an electric fire alarm system, established a professional paid fire department with horse-drawn equipment, and permanently banned wooden construction in the downtown core.
The fire arrived at the precise moment Spokane needed to make a decision about what kind of city it wanted to be. Mining wealth was flooding in from the Coeur d'Alene mountains across the Idaho border. The Northern Pacific had just knit Spokane to both coasts. The population was about to triple inside a single decade. The fire cleared the ground, and what rose from it was a city of confidence and permanence: sandstone facades, pressed-brick warehouses, and stone cornices that still frame the downtown skyline today.
When you walk along Riverside or Sprague Avenue and see those late-Victorian commercial blocks, you are looking at the reconstruction boom of eighteen eighty-nine and eighteen ninety. The Great Fire did not destroy Spokane. It rebuilt it.
