Historic Rockwood neighborhood on South Hill is welcoming to new residents

Rockwood’s neighborhood council has the enviable task of governing a settled neighborhood, happy with the status quo. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Rockwood is almost exclusively residential, with most of its denizens living in single-family homes.

“We’re lucky, in that we don’t have any horrendous issues,” council board member Ellen Robey said. “Because we’re a stable neighborhood and there’s not a lot of turnover, the neighbors know each other. They watch out for each other.”

The neighborhood is bounded by Grand Boulevard, 29th Avenue and Southeast Boulevard on the western, southern and eastern borders of the Missouri-shaped area. The northern border wraps around St. John’s Cathedral at 12th Avenue and Grand and works its way east along Sumner Avenue, Rockwood and 12th until it completes the circuit at Southeast.

The Olmsted brothers, who also designed Spokane’s park system, nestled the Rockwood neighborhood within the South Hill’s natural, heavily forested curves near the turn of last century. A century later, undulating tree-lined boulevards, switchbacks, cul-de-sacs and an endless sea of open intersections still define a neighborhood built when most traffic fed on oats, carrots and bologna sandwiches.

“The Olmsted brothers were a century ahead of their time,” council member Dave Lucas said. “If it’s a windy road, you have to slow down, at least a little bit, and you have to be more concienstious, because you can’t see.”

The Olmsteds designed four parks in the neighborhood, the fourth only recently discovered near 12th and Rockwood.

“It was owned for many years by the Spokane Garden Club,” Lucas said. The club deeded the land to the Spokane parks department, but it continues to manage the garden.

Said Lucas: “The Spokane Garden Club does the gardening and plants all the flowers, the parks department does the big, heavy tree stuff, and the water department mows the lawn.”

The labyrinthine street patterns provide a natural defense against any residential neighborhood’s arch-nemesis: speeding traffic. “They planned all these crookedy (sic) streets to slow traffic down,” Robey said. “That was the goal.”

Speeding has become a serious issue on Rockwood, however, after recent improvements removed many of the twists and turns. .

“When (my husband) and I moved here, Rockwood wasn’t cut over to Southeast Boulevard,” Robey said. “It was a mud bog that went through there.”

“(Now) it’s a race track,” council vice-chair Greg Francis said. “The road is wide and smooth, so it’s hard not to go faster than you’re supposed to.”

The council installed a pair of speed indicator signs at Rockwood’s upper end, and two more will go up near the lower end. The council is thinking about adding an additional speed indicator sign on Grand to slow traffic passing Manito Park.

“It’s a slowdown area, and for all the right reasons, but (Grand) also is a major thoroughfare,” Lucas said. “So we’re trying to reconcile both.”

Francis spearheaded a neighborhood survey in February, sending a list of 10 questions to the neighborhood’s mailing list and posting to its Facebook and Nextdoor app accounts. According to Rockwood’s annual report, 215 of an estimated 1,250 recipients responded.

“We wanted to increase awareness and identify the neighborhood’s needs,” Francis said. “The response was great.”

According to the survey, over 80 percent were aware of the neighborhood council. Fewer than half had ever attended a council meeting, and fewer than 20 percent had attended a meeting in the past two years. The neighborhood’s top concerns were, in order, property crime, roads, sidewalks, traffic and parking.

Francis believes the survey’s results describe a settled, peaceful neighborhood. “Neighborhoods with big issues tend to band together,” he said. “But we don’t have a lot of those types of issues.”

The council holds its meetings at Hutton Elementary School, the neighborhood’s only sizeable gathering place.

“We don’t have a huge park,” Lucas said. “We have to be creative about how we use our neighborhood engagement grants for activities that work well for the whole neighborhood.”

Lucas and former chair Dean Lynch came up with the solution: welcome bags. The council welcomes new residents with a reusable shopping bag, filled with local items such as emergency numbers, STA maps, library locations, snowplowing schedules, water conservation guidelines, a neighborhood council flyer, and gift certificates from local businesses.

“It’s a great opportunity to have some interface, and invite them to the neighborhood council meetings,” Lucas said.

For Robey, the neighborhood has come full circle. “When we moved here, in 1975, there were lots of little kids,” Robey said. “But as time went on, those families moved away and then, for a time, we had no little kids on the street.”

“Now in the last five years we have all ages back on the street,” she said. “We have every age, from 90 to 9 months.”

The council’s longest-serving member, Carol Cunningham, recently died. Cunningham coordinated curbside service, issued dump passes and supervised the annual roll-off event.

“She was the go-to lady for neighborhood cleanup,” Lucas said.

“She was tiny but mighty,” said council secretary Mary Terhaar. “You’d see this little, old gray-haired lady directing traffic around the dumpsters.”

“The roll-off event turned into a community thing,” Terhaar said. “People came two or three times, somebody would bring donuts … it was just a nice social event.”

Said Lucas: “Most of our activities turn out that way. It’s a very neighborly neighborhood.”