Visiting Expo ‘74 Today

The Expo ‘74 site is still at the heart of downtown Spokane and a part of daily life here, but it was never intended to be a museum. The majority of the structures related to Expo ‘74 have disappeared over the subsequent fifty years, with the notable exceptions being the U.S. Pavilion, the Washington State Pavilion (a.k.a. the Spokane Opera House), and the gondola ride over the falls. Each of these have stayed in more or less continuous use since the fair, and have been repaired and remodeled to better meet community needs in the present day.

There are also some places in Riverfront Park where alert visitors can spot elements of the fair, and a few places around the city and state where bits of the fair found new homes after the gates closed. These include plaques that mark the spots of former national pavilions and sculptures that were added to the park as part of Expo.

To me, the biggest legacy of Expo ‘74 is Riverfront Park itself. To get photos for some of the articles at right, I walked all around the park on a Saturday in February of 2024. The sun was out and the weather had crept a few notches above fifty degrees, and that was good enough to bring hundreds of people out to the park. I might have been the only one who was thinking about Expo, but I wasn’t saddened by the changes that I saw. Where the Red Gate once was, people were skating on an ice ribbon. Where the USSR Pavilion stood, a man was throwing a ball for his dog. The geodesic dome of the Ford Pavilion had been replaced by a gigantic red Radio Flyer wagon. Like a living thing, the park has changed and grown as time has passed. Fifty years after the fair, the former Expo ‘74 site is a 100-acre park where people can still live, work, and play in harmony with their environment. I find that a much more fitting legacy for our fair than any collection of buildings could ever be.