The Great Northern Clock Tower

The sandstone tower you see rising one hundred fifty-five feet above Riverfront Park is all that remains of the Great Northern Railway passenger depot, a building that was once described as the finest train station west of Chicago.

James J. Hill completed the depot in nineteen oh two, built with pressed brick and trimmed with native sandstone. The four clock faces are nine feet across, making it the largest clock tower in the American West. For more than seven decades it was the point of arrival for passengers coming into Spokane from the east and west, the landmark that announced you had reached the capital of the Inland Empire.

By the early nineteen seventies, Spokane was preparing for something unprecedented: a World's Fair to be held in the heart of the city. The rail yards that had lined the Spokane River for decades were cleared to create the fairgrounds. The depot was slated for demolition along with everything else. A citizens group called Save Our Stations organized an advertising campaign and a public fight to spare the tower. They succeeded. The depot building came down. The clock tower did not.

The World's Fair that replaced the rail yards was Expo Seventy-Four, the first environmentally themed World's Fair in history, held from May fourth to November third, nineteen seventy-four. With a population of only one hundred seventy thousand at the time, Spokane was the smallest city ever to host a World's Fair, yet nearly five and a half million visitors came. The fair's central theme was environment and the slogan was Progress without Pollution, a striking choice for a city whose river had been an industrial corridor for a century.

The expo site became Riverfront Park after the fair closed. The clock tower, still running, still wound by a parks employee who climbs up each week to keep it accurate, stands as a kind of hinge between those two eras.