![Lisa Brown at WSU Spokane](https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/902/2014/07/2014fall-health-thumb-198x198.jpg)
For the health of a city
For decades the fifty acres at the bend of the Spokane River just east of downtown was a forgotten freight yard, a pocket of blight. Originally an industrial complex dotted with warehouses and laced with train tracks, the city made it a dumping ground for incinerator waste.
By the 1980s, Spokane was also in the weeds. The mining and timber industries that had built the city and sustained it for more than a century were collapsing. Commodity agriculture, the third leg of the city’s economic stool, wasn’t much better.
“This was having a terrible impact on our economy,” says Dave Clack, former chairman of Old … » More …