Shadow Over Sprague A Once-Proud Spokane Neighborhood Is Threatened By An Epidemic Of Vice And A Serial Killer

FOR THE RECORD: 2-25-98 Sprague report correction: Darrell Smith owns Boyd-Walker Sewing Machine Co. in Spokane. His last name was incorrectly reported in Sunday’s special report on the East Sprague neighborhood. First Step Services, a privately run addiction recovery club, is open to the public. The same story suggested otherwise.

FROM FOR THE RECORD (Tuesday, February 24, 1998): Correction Wrong name: A photo in Sunday’s special report “Shadow Over Sprague” misidentified Helen Diedrich, who was playing bingo at the Spokane Youth Sports Association bingo hall.

East Sprague Avenue has always attracted people seeking opportunity - from the American dream to back-alley sex.

For nearly a century, the strip of pavement that connects downtown Spokane to the Valley lured entrepreneurs looking to make a buck, immigrants searching for a home, rebels seeking the wild life.

Today, prostitutes, drug pushers and their customers bring a dark capitalism to street corners where kids once played stickball.

And with them comes something even more sinister: A serial killer.

Five women who used East Sprague as a market to sell their bodies have turned up dead in the last six months - shot and dumped in fields and vacant lots miles from the strip. The latest victim, Sunny G. Oster, was found Feb. 8 in western Spokane County.

Authorities don’t know if the killer plucked his victims from what was once billed as the “most traveled street in Spokane.” But it’s likely the murderer stalked them there, got to know their habits, and made plans to abduct and kill them.

The hunting grounds are a mish-mash of funky antique shops, used-car lots, sex arcades, family businesses and 80-year-old homes. It’s a poor part of town, wedged between Interstate 90 on the south and the railroad tracks on the north.

Italian and African-American families settled in the neighborhood during the first half of the century. For many, it was the only place in Spokane where they could buy a house. Many of their descendants still live in the weather-beaten homes.

Some are joining forces now to fight crime.

By day, people still visit East Sprague to canvass junk marts and small-appliance repair shops for bargains or that hard-to-find part for a 1972 Kenmore washer.

Silver-haired women play bingo at the Spokane Youth Sports Association hall, and the adventurous get their skin inked at Tiger Brand Tattoo, where the slogan is “Be Art.” Italian sausage connoisseurs flock to Cassano’s Grocery, which has been in business at 312 E. Sprague for 70 years.

“On Sunday, every church down here is filled,” says Ben Hicks, a native of the neighborhood who owns the Rainbow Tavern near Sprague and Magnolia. “And those people aren’t from the neighborhood. They come down here from someplace else. So it can’t be all bad down here.”

A less than pious crowd descends at night. They park in alleys and on side streets to rent XXX videos, score methamphetamine from a street-corner dealer, or watch topless women dance at strip joints.

“It’s a two-tiered neighborhood, really,” says Jon Parsons, who works at Marcus Junk and Collectable, a vintage toy shop at 1806 E. Sprague.

“During the day, it’s one of the best collectibles areas in the region. At night, it’s a totally different story. It’s a no-man’s land between Trent Avenue and the freeway.”

Land of opportunity

In the 1920s, Sprague Avenue was the longest continuous stretch of road in the city.

Named for J.W. Sprague, general superintendent of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s, the street was part of the principal transcontinental highway that linked Chicago, the Twin Cities and Puget Sound.

“Thousands of tourists traverse it during the summer season. Hundreds of suburbanites and Valley farmers use it daily,” The Spokesman-Review reported in 1926. “All of them pass through the East Sprague business district, potential customers and investors, possibly.”

The business owners of the East End Commercial Club and the East Sprague Improvement Association went to work. They scrambled to turn the scabland that flanked much of the thoroughfare into a commercial center and promote the shops and markets already there.

It paid off.

By the late ‘20s, East Sprague was a thriving business center. It boasted Nelson Motor Co., the Western Bottling works and the block-long Hazelwood Co., which billed itself as “the last word in both equipment and construction of modern dairying and cold storage development.”

The boom continued for more than two decades.

In April 1948, 10,000 people turned out to watch city officials turn on three miles of street lamps along the avenue, which Public Utilities Commissioner Willard Taft called “the longest stretch of overhead traffic safety lights in the Pacific Northwest.”

A 60-piece marching band from nearby Libby Junior High School led a parade down Sprague that night to cheers from the crowd.

For some businesses, the good times have never ended.

Like his grandfather and father before him, Darrell Johnson owns and operates Boyd-Walker Sewing Machine Co. at 1926 E. Sprague.

From 9 to 5, he and his employees tinker quietly in a workroom in the back of the business, which has occupied the same storefront since 1945.

Johnson and company repair all kinds of machines, from 1926 black-and-gold Singers to supercharged Pfaffs that can be run by home computers.

“We’ve got more than 130 years’ experience between the four of us,” Johnson says with pride. “People from all over Washington, Idaho and Montana bring their machines to us.”

Just down the street, the Checkerboard Tavern marks another piece of neighborhood history.

The bar, with its pool cues stored in milk cans, has operated since 1938 and holds the state’s longest-running liquor license.

Elsie and Dale Clayton bought the Checkerboard four years ago and preside over a steady stream of regulars. Wednesday is the bar’s famous “Peanut Night.” Discarded shells turn the floor into a crunchy carpet.

Their business recently took a hit when Labor Ready, a temporary labor service, moved its offices out of the neighborhood. But the Checkerboard is still getting by, despite the loss of customers and the bad publicity the neighborhood is getting in the wake of the serial killings.

“It’s not so bad down here,” says Elsie Clayton. “Of course, we close at 9.”

Working the street

It’s 9:15 on a Friday night, and two prostitutes who call themselves Brandy and Rene are working the corner of Sprague and Regal.

The weather is good for February - mid-30s, no rain - but they’ve been hooting and waving at passing cars for nearly two hours without success.

“It’s slow,” complains Rene, a 20-year-old Tacoma native. “We haven’t even seen a cop.”

A half block away, two dogs prowling the car lot at A-Z Pawn & Loan bark menacingly at a man wearing a fatigue jacket who shuffles past on the sidewalk. Their slobber pools on the concrete. The man doesn’t flinch.

A Greyhound bus brought the women from San Francisco five days earlier. Brandy wanted to see family, who moved to Spokane from Texas about six years ago. So she came to Spokane, even though the “money’s no good here.”

The cash wasn’t much better in San Francisco, where Rene says the pair was “always getting hassled.” They worked in Western Washington a few months before that.

Dressed all in black, they stand under a sign that says, “Order Your Easter Hams Today.” They giggle some, swear more.

“I didn’t even comb my hair,” Rene says, running a hand over blond locks pulled back tightly in a ponytail. The hair shouldn’t get in the way of business, which is unpleasant enough already. Rene says they endure it for “easy money.”

A serial killer is the least of their concerns.

“There’s a killer no matter where you go,” Rene says. “Or a rapist. Or a kidnapper. Or a robber. We look out for each other.”

Brandy, who turned 21 the next day, pops her gum and nods.

“I’m not scared about the killer,” she says, pausing to wave insistently at a man in a passing pickup. “I’m scared about not making money.”

The decline

Everyone has a theory about why the neighborhood began to erode.

Many blame Interstate 90, which divided East Central in the mid-1960s. Its construction was a double-whammy.

The freeway drew traffic off Sprague Avenue, and the business district withered.

I-90 also isolated the stores, shops and a few hundred houses from the rest of East Central.

Residents who used to walk a few blocks to Sonnenberg’s Market or Acme TV, or to visit neighbors on Pacific Avenue, now had to get across the freeway to get there, sometimes a two-mile trip.

The once bustling Italian neighborhood slowly dissolved as long-time residents sold their property along the interstate and moved away.

Then, in 1974, the World’s Fair came to Spokane.

Expo was a boon to downtown and a bane to East Sprague. City leaders renovated Riverfront Park and swept the rabble off West Main, then the city’s red-light district.

Displaced prostitutes and drug dealers moved on. Some chose West First. Others picked East Sprague.

The neighborhood was further diminished in 1994, when the Spokane School District closed Libby, the only school left in the area. An elementary school had closed years before, when the district consolidated it with a newer school south of the freeway.

When Libby closed, the remaining kids also were bused under the interstate to a new, bigger school. The Libby building became a center for gifted students, most of whom live in more prosperous parts of town.

The turmoil brought devastating results to the once proud neighborhood.

Working families began moving out of the area, and transients, drug dealers and prostitutes moved in.

According to the 1990 U.S. Census, less than half the people who live in the neighborhood own their own homes, and the median household income is less than $10,000 a year. That makes it one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

It leads the city in a more dubious category, according to the Spokane Police Department.

Department statistics show that nearly 80 percent of all prostitution arrests from April 1, 1996, to Dec. 31, 1997, were in the area bordered by Havana and Division, I-90 and Main.

In the past month, two men have been shot to death in the neighborhood.

“Some people might accept it, but we want the whole prostitution issue gone,” says Tom Bernard, president of the East Central community policing substation. “They come into the neighborhoods and do their business, sometimes right in front of houses.”

The future

“This is my neighborhood,” says Sylvia Malar, who lives in the 1900 block of East First. “I’ve lived here for 15 years. I’ll be damned if I let anyone run me out of here.”

Malar also volunteers to lead a support group for recovering alcoholics at First Step Services, a nearby private recovery club.

She says there are some bad things about the neighborhood, sbut the good outweighs them.

Her neighbors appear to lock themselves tight in homes, Malar says. Yet she often finds jars of homemade jam inside her mailbox, left by an elderly woman next door.

In the summer, locked doors open for children in need of snacks or pop.

Johnson, the sewing machine company owner, thinks the demise of First Step, which may be shut down by the city for zoning violations, will help the area. The club, he says, is a magnet for undesirables.

“The pimps, the prostitutes and drug dealers all use it as a common meeting place,” says Johnson, whose business is just across the alley.

“The owners couldn’t control what was going on there. They paint themselves as a refuge - a place where prostitutes could go to feel safe. Well, one of the women who was killed frequented the place. They didn’t save her.”

A movement to clean up East Sprague is now gaining momentum.

A meeting that drew about 150 residents Thursday night offered neighbors a chance to set up Block Watches, meet with police and voice safety concerns.

Bernard vowed to begin meeting regularly with residents, possibly increase volunteer neighborhood patrols.

“We have to stand up for this community,” he says. “The reputation of this neighborhood is up to every one of you to correct.”

Resident Carl Liggins stood among his neighbors and challenged them to reclaim their streets.

“The decent people that live here never get a chance to stand up and say this is a decent place to live.

“We can make a difference.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 11 Photos (5 Color); Graphic: One street, two sides