What Would City’s Pioneers Have Done?

The pioneer capitalists buried in Spokane’s Riverside cemetery had vision. The city they built had more than dams, smokestacks and mansions. It was a city of gorgeous parks and tree-lined boulevards. These public riches, which we treasure today, were created at considerable cost to the men and women whose granite monuments now stand, weathered and mysterious, in the cemetery’s quiet lawns.

What the founders left to us is a living monument - an outdoor recreation ethic that sets our community apart. Since the turn of the century this love for public gathering places spread from parks to golf courses to an environmental world’s fair to Bloomsday and, most recently, to the Centennial Trail.

The trail is the undertaking that will test the vision of those who lead our community now.

As with the creation of a park system, you can build a trail on the cheap, or you can do it on the scale preferred by Spokane’s founders.

Right now the trail’s development has stalled, ironically, at the cemetery where many of the founders rest.

Here lies an opportunity, to create a stupendous stretch of trail. It is an opportunity worthy of our best efforts.

Where the Spokane River bends north and dances out of town, the trail would drop down the high northeastern bank and run along the water’s edge where rapids sing and osprey fish. It would cross the river to the cemetery’s edge, then continue down the thundering gorge.

The cemetery’s board, including descendents of some of Spokane’s most revered families, raises completely understandable concern about infringement on the cemetery’s solitude and expansion plans.

Yet blocking the trail, and forcing users onto busy Government Way where they could be killed literally at the cemetery’s gate, is not the only solution. That’s a lose-lose for all concerned.

In fact, the trail as proposed would go nowhere near existing graves; their solitude is safe. Below existing graves is a forest, then the river. The trail would brush the forest, hugging the river’s edge. Landscaping could hide the trail from view. The river’s roar would drown passing voices.

And, there’s an opportunity for the cemetery’s expansion plans. Thousands of local runners and recreationists may want a final resting place near the popular trail, which links us to each other, our future and our past.

City officials hope for further discussions with the cemetery board. The city has the power to condemn a strip of land for the trail - land the founders once envisioned as a park.

But negotiations can produce a win-win settlement. It’s our generation’s turn to carve a monument - not in stone, but rather in the beauty of a city designed for living. It’s our turn, to give descendents a reason to leave some flowers on our graves.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board