50 years ago in Expo history: Plans were announced for one of downtown Spokane’s fountains that still stands today

Expo ’74 officials announced that a $100,000 aluminum fountain-sculpture by Seattle artist George Tsutakawa would be installed at the southwest corner of Washington State Pavilion Opera House.

This was an artistic coup, since Tsutakawa was an internationally known sculptor. The 20-foot-tall aluminum fountain was a gift to the city, made possible by donations from the Aluminum Company of America, Reynolds Metals Co. and Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp. Expo officials hoped to have it in place by April, before the opening of Expo ’74.

You can still see Tsutakawa’s fountain today, at the corner of Washington Street and Spokane Falls Boulevard.

From 100 years ago: Bill Jones of the Spokane Daily Chronicle spent the night in the Salvation Army’s “flopadorium” – aka flophouse, aka homeless shelter.

He wrote, tongue in cheek, that few other hotels furnished so much music to slumber by. He meant the sounds of snoring, resembling “a summer’s thunder shower in a pine forest near a sawmill.”

The snoring was finally silenced when someone bellowed out of the darkness, “Roll over, Mike, you’re on your back!”

“Men make reservations for their cots during the day,” Jones wrote. “They pay what they can, some a dime, some a quarter. Many sleep there without cost. It is a godsend for hundreds during the cold nights of winter.”

No drunks were allowed – “he is about as welcome as a rattlesnake at a baby clinic.”