Getting There: Hillyard is blossoming, but North Spokane Corridor’s impact is yet to be seen

The northeast Spokane neighborhood that earned a rough-and-tumble reputation in the region’s early history has been improving steadily in recent years, but the next decade may well be the deciding factor in a long-lasting legacy.

With the North Spokane Corridor’s Wellesley connection finally slated for completion this year, taking lumbering trucks off the commercial district’s main street, businesses and planners are preparing for what comes next, which will also include infrastructure improvements in the area east of Market Street known to longtime residents as “Dogtown.” That moniker is seen as derisive by some but has been embraced by others.

Bob Apple, who served on the Spokane City Council from 2004 to 2011 and for many years ran a bar on Market Street, said the current growth spurt began with efforts to develop the historic district in the ’90s. The renovation of century-old buildings is breathing new life into Hillyard, with a number either completed or in the process of being brought up to modern standards.

The Children of the Sun Trail’s in-progress connection to the Centennial Trail south of the Spokane River opens up a new avenue for tourism, and Apple noted a bike rental shop under construction poised to provide ease of access to weekend cycling enthusiasts.

Next year is the centennial of Hillyard’s annexation into the city of Spokane. It previously was its own city.

“Forty years ago, we were at the bottom of the bucket,” Paul Hamilton said, a lifelong resident and former neighborhood chair, in an interview before his death last week. Hamilton was a state wrestling champion at Rogers High School, ran the neighborhood’s Allstate Insurance agency for over a decade and was active in the community as a leading force for the mid-August Hillyard Festival. Hamilton designated himself the paperboy for the Hillyard Festival Gazette, which runs once a year in preparation for the annual festival.

“You can’t just come here and open up your business, you have to contribute,” he said. “When you see young guys picking up the torch, it’s great, man.”

Hamilton was deeply proud for the place he called home all his life.

“When you’re from Hillyard, you wear it like a badge of honor,” he said.

Green’s Fresh Market, which stocks primarily fresh produce, has played a critical role in diminishing a multidecade “food desert” where residents lack access to fresh and healthy options for their groceries. Its owner is Jack Green, who founded the store in 2017.

“People are seeing the future,” Green said. While generally pleased with how the neighborhood had been improving since he’d arrived, he had some concerns on the long-term future of Hillyard.

Green remembers when I-90 opened and diverted traffic away from Sprague Avenue, which led to a multiple-decade decline and predictable lack of revenue for businesses along the former main east-west route. Green worries the completion of the North Spokane Corridor will remove not only large and noisy trucks, but car traffic that is currently funneled along Market Street.

His proposed solution is to make Hillyard a destination, particularly for food, and make it worth the choice to drive through Hillyard rather than sidestepping the neighborhood entirely.

Green said the template for the neighborhood wasn’t to be found in up-and-coming parts of Spokane, but rather to build on the community’s already-established culture.

“We don’t want to be Kendall Yards,” he said. “It’s Hillyard; it has to be its own spot.”

Green said the city could have done a better job reaching out to Hillyard residents about what they wanted for the neighborhood.

Michael Kotsala is one of the four co-owners of Derailer Coffee, which along with Mexican eatery Loco and local Spokane brewery Bellwether Brewing inhabit the former United Bank building on Market Street. The building previously housed the United Hillyard Antique Mall.

Kotsala lauded the sense of community that he and his business had found in Hillyard. “We’re all fans of each other, which is kind of unique,” he said, and the businesses hold meetings where help is exchanged often at no cost.

Kotsala said the unpartitioned, mixed-use space is working well, and the large amount of seating lends itself equally well to professionals getting some work done over a cup of coffee in the morning as friends meeting for a pint in the evening. A large, well-furnished space in a central location would be usually out-of-reach for a fledgling coffeehouse like Derailer to develop individually.

“We could never do this on our own,” Kotsala said, and praised the support of the building’s other businesses, particularly Bellwether’s Dave Musser, who purchased the site in 2021.

Kotsala has 23 years of experience as a pastor and currently leads the church New Life Spokane. The congregation lost its building lease during the pandemic and found refuge in Bellwether Brewing’s North Monroe location, where they continue to hold Sunday services.

The recently opened shop in Hillyard already has a cast of regulars, and Kotsala is hoping it grows into a consistent community. Restaurants, coffee houses and pubs are all social centers, he says, and the United building has all three.

“Community is painfully slow, but we’re committed,” he said. “It’s a long game.”

Despite the area’s recent progress, it’s difficult to shake off a deep-rooted distrust of city support formed from decades of decline after Hillyard’s titular railyard closed for good in 1982. That distrust can form a barrier between locals and those wanting to support them, as Jesse Bank, the Northeast Planning Development Association (NEPDA) executive director, has noticed during his first year on the job.

Bank is creating the Hillyard Subarea Plan, which had its first planning meeting earlier this month during the Hillyard Festival. The development association is intended to sunset in 2040, which incentivizes Bank to create a plan that is measured in scale.

The original focus of the development authority was the area east of Market Street. The largest challenges in that undeveloped core remain dirt streets, poor stormwater infrastructure and little incentive for developers to improve plots because of potentially prohibitive costs.

“The (North Spokane Corridor), by itself, isn’t going to do a ton for that area,” Bank said. “We really need to get in there with improved roads.”

Bank said he envisioned a “sizable bump” in activity once the Wellesley interchange is open. But the biggest spark will be completion of the freeway all the way to Interstate 90, significantly reducing commute time for manufacturers that choose to locate there.

This isn’t Hillyard’s first grand plan.

In the past dozen years, two different plans have been proposed and seemingly implemented, a 2012 master plan created by the Hillyard Neighborhood Council and the 2017 YARD plan to develop the neighborhood’s industrial areas. These plans led to “kind of a hodgepodge over the years,” Bank said, and a long-term concrete plan needed to unify these disparate elements for the area which has not had a formal subarea plan.

Its creation requires managing “planning fatigue” from both elected officials and local business owners, who often start skeptical to the suggestion of yet another community-inspired planning process, Bank said.

Among the planned improvements include paving roads in East Hillyard to facilitate development, some of which have remained gravel paths since the neighborhood’s inception in the 1880s, and cleanup of polluted areas known as brownfields created during the area’s industrial history.

The stretch of Wellesley Avenue between Market and Freya streets, which closed in the summer of 2019, is scheduled to reopen in late September or early October, said Ryan Overton, communications manager for the Washington Department of Transportation’s Eastern Region. The work, originally scheduled to be finished last year, was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and supply-chain issues. Wellesley’s connection to the highway, and the stretch of highway from Francis to Wellesley, is expected to open later this year, Overton said.

Bank supported Green’s interest in creating a destination in Hillyard’s historic district.

He has seen that food and drink businesses are “indicator species” that can draw people to an area and encourage attention to adjacent retail.

The development association, which derives its revenue from the incremental change in tax from the base year 2019 including property, retail sales and new construction sales, has this year posted earnings. Bank is intent on investing them back in the community quickly.

“We need to spend, spend, spend back into the community,” he said.

While he admits to being an outsider to Hillyard, Bank has no intention of straying from what makes the neighborhood unique.

“There’s a sense of reality there, and we don’t want to change that,” he said.

Francis and Freya work causes two-week detour to highway

Both the north- and southbound lanes of Freya Street at Francis Avenue remain closed for installation of a sewer line to a planned gas station and convenience store at 3615 N. Freya St., and will remain so for two more weeks.

The street was first closed Tuesday, causing a several -mile backup on the North Spokane Corridor as motorists attempted to navigate the work at the highway’s current southern ending point. A detour, with signs, is in place directing northbound traffic to Argonne Road on Bigelow Gulch, to Peone Road, where drivers can get on the highway at Parksmith Drive.

City and county officials said their permits indicated just the northbound lanes would be closed during the work, and a portion of Francis was also closed for two days per the permits. Spokane city limits end at Francis, and the stretch of Freya north is in Spokane County. The Washington Department of Transportation is responsible for the highway.

An official at Piersol Construction, the firm completing the work in anticipation of a new Maverik gas station at the site, said Friday that the current two-way closures would continue through Aug. 25.

The work caught the Washington State Department of Transportation off guard, said Ryan Overton, communications manager for the Washington Department of Transportation’s Eastern Region. Motorists appeared to change their behavior after Tuesday’s backups, he said, and traffic volume has fallen on the highway. The southbound offramp at Freya saw on average 6,700 cars per day before construction, he said.

The department has changed its variable signs overhead on the North Spokane Corridor to indicate the road is closed at Freya, Overton said.

Other work to watch for

East Mission Avenue will close Monday through Friday between Greene and Cook streets in the Chief Garry neighborhood. Greene Street will remain open. Crews will be working on a water line.

Staff writer Kip Hill contributed to this report.