Final Stops

Spokane Parental School

Built not to imprison or punish, but to educate, the Spokane Parental School was an innovation in education and corrections. In 1907, the city board of education authorized the construction of a school for wayward or delinquent boys between the ages of six and fifteen. Before then, there was no such facility for discipline challenged youths, and many were likely to end up in a prison cell. The site of the school was chosen along peaceful Latah creek. Famous local architect Albert Held offered his services for free, providing a Dutch Colonial revival plan for the building itself. Donations were received from all around the city, and in 1908 the school was completed.

Students of the school took advantage of natural features of the area. Canoeing, fishing, and farming all competed for the attention of the students. The troubled youths were even given animals to raise, and land to work. The school was touted as a success for many years. But by 1940, its costs had ballooned, causing some to wish for its closure. In 1943 the school was victim of wartime financial scarcity, and was closed. 

The school grounds and outbuildings have since been converted into a housing development. In 2001, a local attorney bought the school with intent on restoration. The Spokane Parental School is currently a private residence. Please show respect and courtesy to its owners. 










St. Joseph's Catholic Church and Convent

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and Covent is a landmark of religious history in Spokane. Finished in 1901, the Church was a marvel of Late Gothic Revival architecture. It is build on the grounds that used contain home of Chester Ide, the same man for whom the neighborhood known as Ide’s Addition was to be named after. 


In 1890, the Catholic Parish of Spokane County built a wooden framed building on the site of the future St. Joseph’s to facilitate Spokane’s growing Catholic community. Spokane was and still is majority protestant. But waves of immigrants from southern Europe and Ireland were changing the dynamic all across the United States. Spokane was no exception.


By the end of the decade, the buildings had not aged well, and plans for a new church were drawn up. The architectural firm known as Preusse & Zittel, Julius A. Zittel being the official state architect of Washington, offered their services pro-bono. After four months of construction the building was completed on October 27th, 1901. In 1905, a school was added, with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Scranton, Pennsylvania to take over instruction. In 1908, the structure was again remodeled with even more Gothic Revival architectural influence. 


A 1923 fire in the school building damaged the third floor badly, and in 1924, a convent was opened on the property to house the teaching nuns, which was later turned into a Parish Center with classrooms and offices. The original school building was demolished and turned into retirement homes for senior Spokanites. In 1928, a Gymnasium was added to the property across the street, which would be used by the Church until the late 1960s. 


St. Joseph’s was only the second Catholic Church built in the city of Spokane, and it served to solidify the relationship between Spokane and the growing Catholic faith. It is still in operation today, and currently offers church services en Español in response to yet another growing Spokane community. 









The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist

In the 1920s, Bishop Edward Makin Cross endeavored to create a successor to the All Saints Cathedral, which stood Downtown. He contracted the services of congregation member Harold C. Whitehouse. Whitehouse, a veteran architect responsible for many of Spokane's buildings, toured Europe in 1923 doing a study of cathedral design. For St. John's, he settled on an English Gothic style with some French influences. 


Bishop Cross selected a vacant lot upon which famous Spokanite Francis Cook's house used to stand. Legend has it that the Episcopal delegation hid their intentions when purchasing the land from the Catholic Cook. The first section of the Church to be built, the Nave leading to the high alter, was completed in late 1929. Ten days after the first mass was held at St. John's, the stock market crashed, sending the country into a long depression. This put an end to the construction for nearly two decades, when the tower, sanctuary and transepts were finally added. 


The cathedral's stained-glass windows each tell a different story, from the Book of Genesis to Revelations. To the right of the high alter, the baptism of famous Native American resident Spokane Garry is depicted. The ceiling of the main crossing consists of a pattern of Stars of David, embedded in a material of compressed corn husks. The cathedral's pipe organ stretches from one end of the 257 foot room to the other. 


The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist has become a landmark of Spokane. Its Gothic tower looks down on the city from the south hill, its style contrasting greatly with the surrounding buildings. After almost a century of construction, the building is still incomplete. Plans for new windows and additions make it certain that this Spokane landmark will continue to grow and evolve. 
















Washington Street Bridge

In 1908, the Washington Street Bridge was constructed over the Spokane River, to provide an avenue for the rapidly growing city’s population. The 242 feet bridge was constructed by the Wallace-Coates Engineering Company of Chicago. They used a series of ribbed concrete arches for stability. The bridge’s costs inflated a great deal during construction. One Spokane city councilmen reportedly said that if they ever spent that much again, “the council would never be able to bond the city for another dollar for any purpose.” Nevertheless, the bridge was completed in 1909. 

In 1910, a group of Spokane businesses offered Harry Houdini an undisclosed cash sum to perform one of his daring magic tricks on the Washington Street Bridge. Houdini reportedly had chains placed around his legs and his hands put in handcuffs, before plummeting to the Spokane River below. Houdini sunk deep into the freezing waters for a moment, before triumphantly arising to the surface unchained. The marketing stunt was a great success, and marks the Washington Street Bridge’s only claim to fame. 

The bridge continued in relatively uninterrupted use until the late 1970s, when cracks and holes were discovered in the concrete superstructure. Weight limits and other stopgap measures were proposed, but in the end the decision was made to re-build it entirely, and by 1985 nothing remained of the original structure. Before its demolition, the Washington Street Bridge had the honor of being the oldest concrete bridge in the State of Washington. 












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Audio and video

The Coming Global Digital Super-pocalypse™

Are all these tricks and tools a curse and not a blessing?  Jerome P. McDonough says in a Science Daily article on the subject, that our reliance on digital will render vast amounts of data unusable in a relatively short period of time.  While its easy to whip up hysteria by pointing to the possible loss of 369 exabytes worth of data, its also perhaps a bit misleading.  The problems of digital preservation seem to mostly be problems of willpower and foresight, not technology.  Like any analog format, if a record is not kept in a controlled and meticulous way, then it may not survive.  What is not even calculable is the innumerable "exabytes" of paper records that do not survive for this very reason.

Image courtesy of Kent State University

What is surprising when discussing problems in digital preservation is the potential ease of their solubility.  Compared to the shear effort taken in physically maintaining a massive collection of say, microfilm, with temperature and  possible toxic waste concerns, the updating of file formats seems to be relatively easy.  The problem of course is doing so en masse to a large collection without losing metadata or quality.  But those problems will be solved as the rest of the field technically evolves.  All in all, despite real problems, I predict a bright future in the realm of digital preservation.

Image courtesy of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections project was designed to present information about and digitized documents relating to the Polar Bear Expedition of 1918 in Russia.  As well as that basic task, it was also designed to track what was useful in building future online archives.  Using web analytics to track user choices, the Polar Bear collection came to some conclusions about user interaction.  With a simple comment feature, the site enabled users to suggest corrections and give further information about specific items.   Bookmarking, which seems somewhat redundant in a world where every browser has that ability, was less successful.  An attempt was made to replicate Amazon.com's link suggestion system, but many of the users did not even notice it.  The biggest flop was a login system, the failure of which Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel would attribute to the sites newness and lack of a large user base.  The lack of any login system on the sites modern main page would seem to indicate that it was not to be.  This is likely a result of "login overload" that many internet users were feeling a few years ago, when every site wanted to be the new "myspace."  The most important feature and only reason for the site's existence, the digital collection itself, was deemed "very important" by 5 of 6 surveyed users.  One user marked it "very unimportant", confirming again my own personal theory that between 10-20% of any given survey have no idea what they are doing.

Image courtesy of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection

The site today, seen above, seems a bit dry and lacking in a presentational flair that many sites have since attempted.  But it stands as an important step in the creation of academic web archives.





  

Trumbull-White House

The Trumbull-White house has a storied history.  It was originally built by architect George Bottler for William and Pearl Trumbull in the Colonial revival style.  William Trumbull was one of the first auto dealers in Spokane.  Pearl Trumbull attempted successfully to make Spokane "Lilac City" and was one of the founders of the Spokane Lilac Parade.

  Between the 1940s and 1960s, the house was occupied by Dr. Elizabeth White, who was one of Spokane's early female medical doctors.  Her life as a civic leader and president of the Deaconess Hospital was an inspiration to many Spokanite women and men alike.

{still trying to find anything on this house.  Not much info out there}  

Spokane Parental School very Rough draft.

Built not to imprison or punish, but to educate, the Spokane Parental School was an innovation in education and corrections.  In 1907, the city board of education authorized the construction of a school for wayward or delinquent boys between the ages of six and fifteen.  Before then, there was no such facility for discipline challenged youths, with many likely to end up in a prison cell.  The site of the school was chosen along peaceful Latah creek.  Famous local architect Albert Held offered his services for free, providing a Dutch Colonial revival plan for the building itself.  Donations were received from all around the city, and in 1908 the school was completed.

Students of the school took advantage of natural features of the area.  Canoeing, fishing, and farming attracted the attention of the students.  The troubled youths were even given animals to raise, and land to work.  The school was touted as a success for many years.  But by 1940, its costs had ballooned, causing some to wish for its closure.  In 1943 the school was finally made victim of financial scarcity, and was closed.  

The school grounds and outbuildings have since been converted into a housing development.  In 2001, a local attorney bought the school with intent on restoring it to its former Dutch Colonial grandeur.

Treason, Trials, and Teaching Archives

                        

The above word jumble comes from a search into the Old Bailey Online project's records for the word "treason".  Then, using zotero to save the search, I exported the data to VoyeurTools.org to do an instant search through the results.  This was the desired result of the Data Mining With Criminal Intent project, headed by Dan Cohen, to make the tools for intricate data visualization and research available to everyone.  The Old Bailey project was an obvious choice, as it was the largest single repository of non-elite stories available.

The Old Bailey project had a very ambitious goal, to digitize millions of pages of documentation stretching back to the 1600s.  Never fully complete, the project has spawned countless projects from the high school to doctoral level.  While not perfect, the level of accuracy is commendable, with less than 1 error in 3000 words.

Some scanned documents are old and hard to read.
Courtesy of the Old Bailey Online project

The scans are not perfect, as indicated in the above image.  But the site gives a machine read version as well, which can be cross checked with the scan.  The easy use of the project has enabled many interesting and creative projects to be built around it, such as this one, which encouraged students to do comparisons of results after changing a single search input.

Data visualization is something we tackled a bit in our class in the Dead of Spokane Project.  The tools we used were just the tip of the iceberg, as is shown in Shawn Allen's interesting article on the subject.  He takes us from the early history of charts and graphs to the present Renaissance of interactive digital visualizations.  

The unemployment rates for people like myself (white, male, college graduates)
Image courtesy of the New York Times.

The above visualization calculates and shows the unemployment levels for different groups of people.  While people like myself have relatively low levels of unemployment, if I were to change a single value (race), the rate doubles.  Does this indicate that racism still exists at high levels among employers?  Or is it a mere accident of geography, with minorities more likely to live in economically depressed urban areas?  The visualization tools used by the NYTimes presents the figures in an interesting and stark way.                                       

Here is little tool that Zach found.  It allows you to edit, share and remix web videos and re-post them.  I dont see a way to download the videos, so Im not sure I can be of any use for SpokaneHistorical.  But it is a fun way to mess with videos online, by adding all sorts of little popups.  All the little popups, from the title, twitter stuff, google map, the jump cut at 00:14, to the annoying loop at the end was added by me in the tool.  It might not be useful for this video, but it might have use for instructional videos or that sort of thing.  The tool allows anyone to re-mix the video by clicking on the little recycle symbol at the bottom.  Give it a try.

https://popcorn.webmaker.org/

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and Convent

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and Convent is a landmark of religious history in Spokane.  Finished in 1901, the Church was a marvel of Late Gothic Revival architecture.  It is build on the grounds that used contain home of Chester Ide, the same man for whom the neighborhood known as Ide’s Addition was named after. 

In 1890, the Catholic Parish of Spokane County built a wooden framed building on the site of the future St. Joseph’s to facilitate Spokane’s growing Catholic community.  By the end of the decade, the building had not aged well, and plans for a new church were drawn up.  The architectural firm known as Preusse & Zittel, Julius A. Zittel being the official state architect of Washington, offered their services pro-bono. After four months of construction the building was completed on October 27^th, 1901.  In 1905, a school was added, with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Scranton, Pennsylvania to take over instruction.  In 1908, the structure was again remodeled with even more Gothic Revival architectural influence. 

A 1923 fire in the school building damaged the third floor badly, and in 1924, a convent was opened on the property to house the teaching nuns, which was later turned into a Parish Center with classrooms and offices.  The original school building was demolished and eventually that part of the property was turned into retirement homes for senior Spokanites.  In 1928, a Gymnasium was added to the property across the street, which would be used by the Church until the late 1960s. 

St. Joseph’s was only the second Catholic Church built in the city of Spokane, and it served to solidify the relationship between Spokane and the growing Catholic faith.  It is still in operation today, and currently offers church services en Español in response to yet another growing Spokane community.