7/14 - Spokane's Riverfront Park and Gonzaga Univ

The two places we went today are worth writing about and sending pictures so I’m not taking the day off.  Maybe tomorrow.  :-D 

The first stop was Riverfront Park which was created for Expo ’74, the World’s Fair event in Spokane.  It’s a very nice park along the falls section of the Spokane River.

When the park was built the old train station had to be demolished but its clock tower was saved.

My cousin Chantelle with the trash-eating metal goat sculpture near the park entrance.  This is a great way to get people (especially kids) to pick up trash.  Press the button to turn it on and feed pieces of paper to the goat.  This has really helped keep the park clean because children love feeding the goat.

There’s quite a history to go with this fantastic handmade carrousel from 1909, made by America’s first great carrousel carver.  The animals were carved by hand, and the tails of the horses are real horse tails.  The creator was Charles Looff who left his native Schleswig-Holstein in 1870 to come to New York to work as a woodcarver.  He made furniture in a Brooklyn factory by day and spent his nights carving wooden animals.  They were eventually painted and assembled on a frame and platform he erected at Coney Island…..the famous resort’s first carrousel which was an instant success when it opened in 1876.  Even after Looff opened his own factory and made many other carrousels, he still did much of the carving himself.  His original model for the horses was a picture of George Washington astride his favorite horse. The horses are now highly prized by collectors.  It is doubtful that he did much of his own carving after the Riverfront Park Carrousel was finished because of the full time job of managing his factories and several amusement parks.

Looff, who was by then a giant in the amusement park business, built the Riverfront Carrousel for the owners of another park in Spokane (the Natatorium) who balked at the $20,000 price tag once the work had been completed.  Looff then gave the carrousel to his daughter as a belated wedding present and his son-in-law took over management of the Natatorium.  When the Natatorium closed in 1968 the carrousel was dismantled and put into storage.  Following a grass-roots fund-raising campaign, it was purchased by the City of Spokane for installation at Riverfront Park.  After restoration and six months of construction on its new building and final installation, the carrousel was again open to the public in 1975.  With the exception of a few of the horses’ glass eyes and a few tails, the carrousel is original equipment. 

Spokane, meaning “Children of the Sun,” was named for the Indian tribe of that name.  It’s pronounced “Spokan,” not “Spokayne.”  It used to be called Spokane Falls but the “falls” got dropped somewhere along the line.  The falls aren’t high but they go on for quite a distance and there are numerous tiers which are close enough to one another to be able to see them all from the park. 

  

Part of the falls with the historic Flour Mill in the center background.  The large building on the left looks like condos and they all have a great view of the river and falls.  We’d like one of the penthouses except winters in Spokane are too rough for Jim’s taste. LOL

Where there’s water there are gulls.  They were all in one area in the middle of the river.  Surprisingly, there weren’t any running around the park looking for hand-outs. Maybe they were just taking a break.

Couldn’t resist including this picture of the tower from the Spokane County Courthouse.  We didn’t drive by it so didn’t see the whole building but it’s a really beautiful tower.  When it was started in 1893 a design contest was held.  The winning design closely resembled two 16^th century chateaus in France.  In 2006 the tower was renovated and the roof was replaced, all at a cost of about $2 million.

After the park and an excellent lunch at a nearby Irish pub, we stopped by Gonzaga University.  The first floor hallway is lined with pictures from many of their graduating classes.  We found the ones of both Gabe and her father……Gabe in a production of South Pacific and her father on the boxing team.  (Gabe said one of the reasons her father took up boxing was because my father, who was her father’s favorite cousin, was the middleweight champion of the University of Minnesota in ‘23 and ‘24.)  

One of the school’s most famous alumni was Bing Crosby.  He never graduated, having been thrown out of school for drinking and carousing.  They certainly welcomed him back after he became famous, though.  The Crosby Library houses his Oscar and other memorabilia but we elected not to go to the library because of the heat which was around 90 degrees by that time. 

Bing Crosby on the 1921 varsity baseball team at Gonzaga.  Not easy to recognize even when you know who it is.

Gonzaga’s College Hall with a statue of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits founded Gonzaga in 1887 and named it for the young Jesuit saint Aloysius Gonzaga. 

We’ve had three great days in Spokane and have been supremely lucky to have had temperatures in the 70’s which is very unusual. (It’s not uncommon for the area to have triple-digit highs.)  The TV weather forecasters keep asking where their summer is. Tomorrow we move 200 miles west to Yakima which will be much hotter.