Bluff History
29th Ave & High Dr Trailhead
The Landscape of a City
In 1906, Spokane’s newly-formed Board of Parks Commissioners named Aubrey White as their first president. Intent on developing a cohesive plan for the open space of a city in the midst of an industrial mining boom, White learned that the prestigious Olmsted Brothers landscape firm, based in Brookline, Massachusetts, was overseeing projects in Portland and Seattle. White contacted John Charles Olmsted and convinced him to stop in Spokane to assess the parks situation here.
Aubrey White 1910
Photos courtesy Tornado Creek publications
Aubrey White in his garden with 3 of his daughters
Spokane teepees in Indian Canyon, 1907-08 From Olmsted, Report to the Board of Park Commissioners, Spokane, Washington
During the course of several visits over the following year, White accompanied John Charles Olmsted or his associate, James Frederick Dawson, on a series of field trips, applying the Olmsteds’s “City Beautiful” philosophy to both the sprawling new city and the rugged river and basalt landscape that surrounded it. In 1908, for a fee of $1000.00, the firm submitted a comprehensive plan for Spokane City Parks. That plan included improvements for ten parks already in service as well as twenty new parks both within and on the outskirts of the town boundaries. Several photographs in the report showed tribal activities and encampments in Indian Canyon, documenting how Spokane people continued to occupy their traditional lands even as the city rose around them.
The Olmsted recommendations called for a host of ball fields, play areas, and tree-lined boulevards, but open space, especially along the extensive undeveloped margins of Spokane, played a key role in their vision of a healthy environment. Expansive "reservations of country scenery" become more and more necessary as cities grow, the report stated. Such areas "offer inducements for the people to walk reasonable distances amid agreeable, nerve-resting surroundings" (Olmsted).
John Charles Olmsted at work
Olmsted Network
The Hangman Creek drainage and the steep bluffs that towered above its east flank played a key role in the Olmstead concept. Citing the drainage as Latah Creek—both names had been used since the 1858 tribal wars rocked the region—the report proposed creating a new Latah Park that would begin at the confluence of the creek with the Spokane River, then continue upstream to the present Qualchan Golf Course. This park would encompass the extensive bluffs below Brown’s Addition and follow the proposed East Latah Parkway up the South Hill. The Olmsteds wanted this Latah route to connect with the High Drive Parkway, thus creating “a picturesque driveway lying on the high bluff in the southwest portion of the city, overlooking the Latah Creek valley, and with its extension around the bluff, connecting with the Latah tract, it will be one of the most sightly driveways of the system.” Their report included a detailed rendering of the drive and landscaping from 20th to 29th Avenues.
High Drive Parkway between 20th and 29 Avenues, as rendered in the Olmsted Report
Beyond 29th Avenue, the plan called for the drive to “continue along the plateau.” They noted that much of this area “is wooded and suitable for rambling grounds and picnicking… Another drive would slant down the hillside and connect with country roads in the [Hangman] valley.” This corresponds to today’s Hatch Road.
Spokane in 1908 could be very hazy, and the Olmsteds saw this combination of bluffs and parkway as a remedy to poor air quality and other stresses of urban life. “The bluff drive will command beautiful and extensive views from south to northwest across the valley of Latah Creek and over an extensive reach of picturesque country beyond. It will be open to the refreshing prevailing southwest breezes of summer, and will therefore be more free from smoke and dust than the smaller parks of the city. The wooded ravines [such as today’s Rocket Gulch] will give opportunities for delightful secluded walks and resting places.”
The scale of the Olmsted Brothers’s vision must have seemed wildly ambitious for a city that counted its total parklands in the hundreds of acres. For the proposed Latah Park alone, the report reckoned that “The total area of this land as planned is 2286 acres, of which 657 acres are on practically level land above the bluff, 557 acres are on very steep and valueless land, and the rest slopes modestly steeply and irregularly down to the creek.” Yet over the next two decades, Aubrey White, aided by his connections with the city’s political leaders, carried out many of the projects contained in the Brothers’s original Report to the Park Board.
The Olmsteds visualized a landscape of carefully managed green space designed for viewing pleasure and practical accessibility. In the century since Aubrey White and his cohorts began to put the Olmsted plan into practice, the brothers’s sense of large parks with logical geographical connections has served the city well. Steep land along the Hangman Creek bluffs that the report deemed “valueless” for development is now recognized as invaluable habitat for a host of species. We now appreciate the way in which dynamic Ice Age Flood events shaped the drainage. Cohesive natural communities, including far-reaching salmon runs, are part of the known past and hopeful future of the watershed. Under the current threat of wildfire, the history of tribal fire management has become a touchstone for controlled burns and forest thinning.
Today, the Olmsted Brothers’s idea of seamless walks up Hangman Creek and across the bluffs that rise above it remains a work in progress. But thanks to the seed of their ideas and generations of determined advocates, their vision of wooded ravines, endless rambles, and refreshing air remains before us.
Bank swallow colony amid Ice Age flood rhythmites near the mouth of Hangman Creek
Further Reading
Jim Kershner’s account for HistoryLink covers the story of how Aubrey White and the Parks Commission came to hire the Olmsted firm and accomplish the building of parks all around the city. https://www.historylink.org/File/8218
The Olmsted Brothers Report from 1908 included the maps and renderings of their proposed parks. It was printed as The Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, Spokane, Washington, 1891-1913. An original copy of this document resides in the Northwest Room of the Spokane Public Library.
Experiencing Olmstead: The Enduring Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’s North American Landscapes (Birnbaum et. al.,Timber Press, 2022) provides an overview of Olmsted theories and the City Beautiful movement.
Greenscapes: Olmsted’s Pacific Northwest (Joan Hockaday, Washington State University Press, 2009) focuses on their work in the Washington and Oregon.
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