The Davenport Hotel in Spokane locked its doors for the last time in 1985. Presidents had slept there, and men who had pulled fortunes out of Idaho mountainsides had celebrated under its chandeliers. Now the grand ballroom hosted pigeons, rain crept across the lobby floor, and the ornamental plaster crumbled in darkness. For seventeen years, the most beautiful hotel between Minneapolis and Seattle sat empty, a monument to everything Spokane had been and could no longer afford to maintain.

Spokane had built its wealth on an unusual foundation. It manufactured nothing famous, served as no major port, and anchored no railroad terminus. The city grew rich because miners who extracted silver, lead, and zinc from the Coeur d’Alene Mining District of northern Idaho, roughly seventy miles away, chose to spend their money there. The mines were remote and harsh.

The mining towns of Wallace and Kellogg were rough, functional places. Men who struck it rich did not want to live among the ore carts. They wanted a city with culture, climate, and comfort, and Spokane, sitting at the intersection of several rail lines with a waterfall running through its center, offered exactly that. The story began in 1873, when James Glover, a farmer from the Willamette Valley, arrived at Spokane Falls and saw a massive waterfall with enough power to drive mills and attract industry for generations.

He bought land, filed claims, and promoted the settlement with relentless optimism. The Northern Pacific Railway arrived in 1881, the same year the town incorporated, and growth was immediate and chaotic. On August 4, 1889, a fire started downtown. The exact origin was debated, but within hours it consumed the entire commercial core.

Roughly thirty-two blocks were destroyed, including banks, hotels, shops, and the Northern Pacific Depot, with damage estimated at several million dollars. Photographs from the aftermath show block after block reduced to rubble with chimneys standing alone above the ash. The people of Spokane did not leave. They rebuilt immediately, aggressively, and in brick and stone rather than wood.

The fire paradoxically made the city grander, replacing cheap frontier construction with masonry buildings that had weight, permanence, and architectural ambition. The money to justify that ambition was already flowing. The Bunker Hill and Sullivan mine alone operated for decades and produced ore worth hundreds of millions over its lifetime. Around 1901, prospectors including Harry Day and his partners struck one of the richest veins of silver and lead ore anyone had ever seen at the Hercules mine.

The owners became millionaires many times over almost overnight. But they built their city above ground, not at the mines. By 1910, Spokane’s population had passed one hundred thousand, a remarkable figure for a city so far from any coast. It was the undisputed commercial hub of what locals proudly called the Inland Empire, a vast territory stretching across eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and parts of Oregon.

Mining companies made their financial decisions at Spokane banks. Timber outfits negotiated contracts on Riverside Avenue. Wheat farmers shipped their grain through the city. The architect most responsible for channeling this ambition into stone was Kirtland Cutter, who had studied in Europe and understood grandeur as a statement of permanence.

The mining elite lined up to hire him. He designed mansions along the South Hill, commercial buildings downtown that would not have looked out of place in Philadelphia, and then came the Davenport. Louis Davenport had started with a small restaurant near the falls in the 1890s, by some accounts little more than a waffle stand. He was not a mining baron, but he had an enormous vision and the kind of persuasion that convinces investors to fund the impossible.

Around 1914, his grand hotel opened. Cutter designed it. The lobby alone was vast, with ornate plaster work and a fireplace that reportedly drew guests just to sit beside it. Crystal chandeliers, ballrooms where the region’s wealthiest gathered, presidential visits, rooms that guests from New York and San Francisco reportedly called magnificent.

The Davenport was not just a hotel. It was Spokane’s argument that it belonged among the great cities of the West. And for a while, the argument held. Streetcar lines reached into newly developed neighborhoods, many of them the vision of J.

P. Graves, who understood that you could sell real estate far more profitably if you also built the streetcar line that connected it to downtown. The city had theaters designed to compete with cities ten times its size. The Crescent, its leading department store, drew shoppers from across the region.

On a Saturday evening in 1915 or 1920, walking from the Davenport east along Riverside Avenue, it was easy to feel like the city had already arrived. The truth was more complicated. The wealth that built Spokane was extracted wealth. It came out of the ground in another state, was converted to cash by companies and owners who could invest it anywhere they chose, and was spent in Spokane only because the people holding it preferred the climate and social life.

The city was not producing this wealth. It was hosting it. When mining output began its long uneven decline, not a sudden crash but a decades-long contraction as the richest ore bodies were exhausted, Spokane had no backup. Timber helped for a while.

Agriculture moved through the city. But nothing replaced the concentration of mining wealth that had built the downtown. The city did not collapse. It just quietly stopped growing.

By the 1940s and 1950s, population growth stalled. The explosive ambition was gone, replaced by maintenance. And then came forces that would hit Spokane harder than the mines ever could by closing. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 routed Interstate 90 through the city, restructured which parts of town mattered, physically severed neighborhoods, and shifted the calculus of where to shop and invest.

Shopping malls and big box stores at highway interchanges offered parking that downtown could not match. The money did not leave Spokane. It left downtown Spokane. Federal urban renewal programs then offered cities money to demolish blighted areas and replace them with modern development.

In practice, they demolished thousands of irreplaceable buildings across America, often the very buildings that gave cities their character, density, and economic resilience. Older buildings with lower rents housed the small businesses, immigrant enterprises, artists, and services that kept downtowns alive. Remove them and you do not get gleaming towers. You get parking lots.

A surface parking lot generates almost no tax revenue, employs almost no one, and contributes nothing to the street. Demolition did not solve decline. It accelerated it. In 1974, Spokane hosted a World’s Fair, Expo 74, themed around environmentalism.

It was the smallest city to host a world’s fair in modern memory, and by most accounts it was a genuine triumph, drawing over five million visitors. The railroad yards along the Spokane River were transformed into fairgrounds that became Riverfront Park after the fair ended, still the centerpiece of downtown. But there was a cost the celebration obscured. The old Great Northern Depot was torn down.

The switching yards, freight buildings, and rail connections that had physically linked Spokane to the national economy and brought the mining wealth in the first place were all cleared. The clock tower survived almost as an afterthought. The sustained economic revival that civic leaders hoped the fair would trigger proved far harder to achieve. The 1980s were brutal.

The regional economy struggled. Timber markets weakened. The mining industry offered no lifeline. In a country where growth is the only metric that attracts investment, stagnation is a death sentence delivered in slow motion.

And in 1985, the Davenport closed its doors. It did not burn down. It just became too expensive to operate in a downtown that no longer generated enough foot traffic to fill its rooms. The last guests checked out, the staff locked up, and for seventeen years, one of the finest hotels in the Western United States sat empty.

Around the year 2000, a couple named Walt and Karen Worthy bought it. Worthy was a Spokane-area businessman who had built his money in construction and development, and by most accounts he saw something a spreadsheet would not show. The restoration cost was reported somewhere in the range of thirty to forty million dollars, with some estimates running higher. Skilled craftsmen repaired the ornamental plaster by hand, matching the original techniques.

The lobby’s signature fireplace was restored. The chandeliers that had hung in darkness for almost two decades were cleaned, repaired, and rehung. The Davenport reopened in 2002, and it is by almost any measure one of the great American preservation success stories. The Worthies proved that the building could work as a business again.

The downtown has seen real reinvestment since. Riverfront Park underwent significant renovation in the 2010s. The metro area has grown, partly fueled by people priced out of Seattle and Portland. The South Hill mansions are still there, beautifully maintained.

The Spokane River still crashes over the falls in the center of the city, the same falls that drew James Glover in 1873. But walk a few blocks in any direction from the Davenport, and you will find the gaps: the surface parking lots where four-story stone buildings used to stand, the empty storefronts, the evidence of decades when the city treated its own built heritage as disposable. The chandelier hangs in a restored lobby now. The plaster is repaired.

The pigeons are gone. It took seventeen years of emptiness and tens of millions of private dollars to save one building in one city. Across the country, other buildings, less famous, less photogenic, but no less important to the blocks they anchor, are still waiting. The economics of the moment always favor tearing down.

It is the economics of the century that tell you whether the decision was wise.