Expo 74: Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment

It was small, but it was ambitious. A public works project in many ways meant to return a decaying downtown area into a public park in a city, the smallest up to that point, that would ever host a World’s Fair. It was pertinent, with Earth Day activities all the rage across the country, that Expo ’74 would use the special theme nature of a Special Category fair with B.I.E. sanctioning to such effect. Over a five-year period of time, Spokane reclaimed the area around the Spokane Falls and cleaned the river for spectacular fairgrounds, and got ten nations to participate, including an $11.5 million pavilion from the United States. Yes, international participation was less than they wanted, striving for twenty-three. The city businessmen were behind the effort, taxing themselves to pay for bonds. It is estimated that Expo ’74 sparked $700 million in economic activity during the ten years surrounding the event. It is estimated that the reclamation project, without the fair, would have taken twenty-five years to pull off. The dream of a riverfront park had been around since 1910. Now it was a reality… read more >