Paving Over Nora A Thin Slice Of Pastoral Beauty Along I-90, Nora Avenue Will Soon Be Just Another Strip

From the deck of his log home on East Nora Avenue, Gary Fifer looks out on a changing world.

He hears Interstate 90’s dull roar to the north.

Beyond the freeway, mounds of earth loom where next year the Spokane Valley Mall will stand. And, just across adjacent Mamer Road, workers dig in preparation for a new office complex.

And then, a neighbor passes along Nora. Lisa Higginbothom waves from atop her white mare, Apache, oblivious to the freeway racket.

“She’s the last one,” Fifer says with a nostalgic smile. He used to have horses, too, but sold them this spring.

The section of Nora that runs between Pines and Mamer is changing. Once an island of rustic houses and pastures, it is quickly becoming a place of model homes, offices, and traffic.

Neighbors aren’t steamed. They aren’t mounting an effort to combat development. But they’re sad to say good-bye to a the way of life that attracted them to this nestled strip in the first place.

Higginbothom has lived along Nora for just three years. “(It) changed big time, especially when the mall started. Seeing all the wildlife go away is too bad,” she says.

The owls, quail and rabbits are scarce these days. She even misses the skunks. “I finally got a little farm, and it’s in the middle of the city, it feels like,” Higginbothom says. She’ll ride Apache around to neighborhood yard sales as long as she can. But she fears that soon, traffic will be too much.

“I’m going to have to move,” she says.

The first real development started in 1979, when Bill Main Sr. built an office building. “There wasn’t much here, there just wasn’t,” Main says.

But he welcomes the growth. A prime freeway spot like the Nora frontage, he says, could never remain undeveloped. “You can’t hardly expect that when you get that close to the freeway. It just wouldn’t make sense,” Main says. “All along the freeway you’ll have office buildings and things like that.”

Why? “The attractive thing about the freeway is exposure for my sign,” says Gene Brazington, owner of CLS Mortgage. Like Main, he opened his business more than a decade ago and not far from Pines Road. Newer commercial buildings, though, are heading east and toward houses.

Colleen Barry, who owns Premier Custom Homes and Sunrooms, says projects like the mall and the planned Evergreen freeway interchange are exactly what draw developers. Her Lindal Cedar Homes model home, which house about 2,000 square feet of office space that will be leased out in addition to her own offices, will open in September.

Another company, Viceroy Homes of Canada, also plans to build a model home and offices on Nora.

Neighbor Anne Henry said she doesn’t mind the growth, as long as no one tries to force her out of the home she has lived in for 40 years. She was there when there was no freeway, only pasture. Now, a 272-unit apartment complex, Ridgeview Estates, is planned for Mission just above and to the south of Henry’s flowered, shady yard.

Elda Martin, though, dreads the opening of the Evergreen interchange. It should be open by 1999. The reason the 76-year-old moved here in 1959 was because of the privacy, pastures and pine trees.

“I kind of hate to see it all move in, you know,” Martin says. “It kind of makes me wonder how long we’re going to be here.”

Fifer still smarts from selling those horses. This spring, he sold his two or so acres of pasture to Inland Construction, the company building the office complex at 1618 N. Mamer.

“For me, it was real difficult,” he says. “It ended my whole way of life.”

The 47-year-old first moved to the area in 1967. Back then, the freeway wasn’t as loud, but more fun to watch. Fifer remembers seeing caravans of vehicles with deer and elk strapped to the tops of them go past.

In his spare time, he and friends would ride all around the area. Sometimes they would take Mission all the way to Sullivan. The only obstacles he remembers are the wild birds that would fly from bushes when the horses clopped past.

In the late ‘70s, more traffic began heading down Nora. About four times a year, drunks would mistake the road for the Interstate 90 on-ramp.

“They’d go flying over the guard rail, landing upside down in my pasture,” Fifer says in his quiet, country voice. “I’d come out, my fence would be down, they’d be scaring my horses, the state patrol would be out here … it was wild.”

He sold his pasture because he figured development, now, was inevitable. Before he sold, he asked his neighbors if it was OK. They said yes; not because they wanted development, but because they saw no way to fend it off.

“They realized it was coming,” Fifer says in a forlorn voice. “Mrs. Martin was a little discouraged. She realized it was a matter of time.”

It wasn’t always so.

In 1979, a developer wanted to build apartments in the area, Fifer says. All the neighbors banded together to fight the proposal; they won. In the mid-‘80s, someone tried to put in a waterslide park. The county shot that down, too.

These days, folks are resigned. Instead of fighting, they talk of moving. They talk of getting a place in the country … again.

Fifer still has his log house. Wagon wheels decorate his yard, and a windmill looks over the place. Inside, the wooden walls are oiled a glossy dark yellow. Guns, a hunting bow, mounted antlers, a stuffed deer head and an old handle-crank telephone decorate the walls. A wagon-wheel chandelier hangs from the ceiling.

But for Fifer the real country life is gone.

“I had horses,” he remembers as he looks at the bulldozers now across the street. “I tried to be a cowboy, too.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 photos (2 color)