SPOKANE, Wash. — The ongoing celebration for the Expo '74 50th Anniversary serves as a reminder of one of the first times the city of Spokane was considered an actual Boomtown.
All around Riverfront Park are reminders of the major event that brought the world to the Lilac City's front door. The 1974 World's Fair brought major change to downtown Spokane, transforming the banks of the Spokane River from industry to recreation. However, that change didn't happen overnight.
It was three years earlier when plans to bring the world's fair to Spokane first started being worked up. The bid was the brainchild of urban developer King Cole, brought in by the group Spokane Unlimited.
"In my mind, I thought, 'Spokane and a World's Fair? There's no way Spokane could handle something like that,'" said Hope Fulwiler, who worked in the Spokane city manager's office when the fair was being planned.
Looking at Spokane's downtown landscape at the time, the doubts aren't surprising. Before 1972, a tapestry of train tracks and two levels of trestles weaved across the area now known as Riverfront Park.
"You didn't know the river was there unless you went to the bank of it," Fulwiler recalled.
According to Anna Harbine, a Johnston-Fix Curator of Archives and Special Collections at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC), Fulwiler wasn't the only skeptic.
"It is a classic David and Goliath story at the time that the fair was even thought about," Harbine said. "When King Cole would bring it up, people would just kind of laugh at him and be like, 'Yeah, that's a great idea. Sure.'"
After getting the bid from the Bureau of International Expositions, the real work began, from getting the money to getting the land. Mike Kobluk, who worked as the director of performing and visual arts for Expo '74, said the biggest miracle turned out to be the railroads leaving the area years before they had to.
"They moved at their expense off of that property and donated that property to the city to become a park," recalls Kobluk.
Construction began in 1972, but in the process of building the fairgrounds, Trent Alley, a cultural hub for Spokane's international community, came down.
"That area started to flourish in the 1920s with Japanese and Chinese businesses, and there's no remnants of those," Harbine said. "They were all torn down and turned into parking lots."
The fair officially opened on May 4, 1974, to a crowd of 85,000 people. At the time, Spokane was the smallest city in the world to host the fair. More than five million people walked the grounds during the fair's six-month run.
"It just was a real chance of a lifetime to be part of that," Fulwiler said.
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