Spokane renames downtown street ‘Joe Albi Way’ in honor of sports booster

The Spokane City Council on Monday unanimously voted to rename a downtown street after Joe Albi, the attorney, businessman and sports booster who was once the namesake of the city’s largest stadium.

A section of Dean Avenue between Howard and Washington streets will be rechristened Joe Albi Way. The 900-foot stretch of road is surrounded by sporting venues, with the Spokane Arena to the west, the unfinished downtown stadium to the north and the Podium to the south.

Spokane Public Schools in 2022 tore down Albi‘s namesake stadium after 70 years of use. A new $31 million downtown stadium will take its place. The district requested the name change to honor Albi’s legacy.

Before its demolition last year, Joe Albi Stadium in northwest Spokane was the city’s biggest outdoor venue. The 30,000-seat facility hosted football games for multiple high schools and dozens of notable events, including an Elvis Presley concert and multiple preseason matchups for National Football League teams.

Sports fans and concertgoers will now walk along Joe Albi Way when they visit the downtown stadium. A plaza at the new building will bear Albi’s name, too, and the school district is bringing in the 600-pound bronze Albi statue that once lived at the northwest Spokane venue.

In a letter supporting the name change, Mayor Nadine Woodward called Albi “a community icon who tirelessly worked to improve the City through athletics and memorable events.”

According to Logan Camporeale, a historic preservation specialist for the city and county, the three-block stretch of Dean Avenue was “potentially ripe for renaming.”

In a letter provided to Spokane Public Schools, Camporeale wrote that Dean Avenue owes its name to Chester Dean Ide, a “serial” homesteader who moved to Spokane in 1878 and named the street after himself. Ide received hundreds of acres of land from the federal government that were ancestral territories of multiple Native American tribes, including the Spokane Tribe of Indians.

Ide, who was born in Vermont and fought for the Union in the Civil War, was well-known in Spokane in the late 1800s. He and his family members were among the first white people to move to the area.

Renaming a portion of Dean Avenue won’t be a significant blow to the Ide family’s legacy in Spokane. A separate section of Dean Avenue will continue to cut through the West Central neighborhood.