50 years ago in Expo history: A reporter hailed what is today the First Interstate Center for the Arts

Spokane Chronicle reporter Frank Bartel visited Expo ’74’s nearly completed Washington State Pavilion and pronounced it “awesome.”

“The view from the upper balcony of the Opera House to the stage, several stories below, is breathtaking,” he wrote. “The vistas afforded from aisles, winding up the nine-story glass-walled auditorium, are staggering.”

He noted that the Opera House and adjoining exhibition hall covered over 185,000 square feet of ground, and that the concrete used in the building would “pave a driveway of normal width 13 miles long – from here to Cheney.”

Today we know the Washington State Pavilion as the First Interstate Center for the Arts and its adjoining Spokane Convention Center.

From 100 years ago: The cities of British Columbia – which were fueling Washington’s illicit liquor trade – were filled with “the scum of the earth.”

At least that’s what a Spokesman-Review correspondent said in a special report.

Vancouver was taking steps to “clear the city of the underworld drifters and criminals, who have been attracted from Seattle, Portland, Spokane, San Francisco” and other Western cities.

The correspondent was convinced that there was “a rising tide of resentment against conditions that put British Columbia in practical partnership” with U.S. bootleggers and rum-runners. Vancouver had just installed a new chief of police who promised to get tough.