The Inland Northwest's river city where Expo '74 left a waterfall park at the city's heart — where Spokane sits on the Columbia Plateau at the falls of the Spokane River (a 50-foot drop in the heart of the downtown — one of the largest urban waterfalls in the United States, powering the first hydroelectric grid in the American West in 1889), Riverfront Park (formerly the site of Expo '74 — the world's first environmentally themed World's Fair, held on both banks of the Spokane River within walking distance of the city centre) has been the city's recreational core since the fair's clean-up of an industrial rail yard transformed the riverbank into a park, the 1914 Davenport Hotel (the most ornate early 20th-century hotel in the Pacific Northwest interior, with a Peacock Lounge and a lobby ceiling with 1914 plasterwork) and the 1895 Spokane County Courthouse (a French Renaissance château with copper turrets — considered the finest late-Victorian civic building in the Pacific Northwest interior) line the downtown core, and the Coeur d'Alene Lake resort (60 km east in Idaho — the most photographed lake in the Pacific Northwest) and the Palouse wine region (60 km south) are both within easy day-trip distance
Spokane (230,000 city; 600,000 metro) is the second-largest city in Washington State and the economic, medical, and educational hub of the Inland Northwest — the region encompassing eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana. Spokane sits on the Spokane River at a natural crossroads of trade routes used by Indigenous peoples for millennia and by Euro-American settlers from the 1870s.
The Spokane Tribe ('Children of the Sun') fished the Spokane River's falls for salmon for thousands of years before the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1881, triggering a regional silver mining boom that made Spokane one of the fastest-growing cities in the American West between 1880 and 1900. The 1974 World's Fair (Expo '74) — held on an industrial rail yard along the Spokane River — was the world's first environmentally themed world's fair, and its cleanup of an industrial rail yard into Riverfront Park remains the single most significant urban transformation in Spokane's history. The…