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Building History

This large warehouse served Spokane's Crescent Department Store, beginning in 1908. The Crescent opened fortuitously one day after the extensive Spokane Fire of 08/04/1889. Opening intact, the Crescent Department Store enjoyed massive success from its first day. Six years later, a subsidiary of the Crescent Department Store, a whole sale clothing manufacturing and warehouse operation called the "Spokane Dry Goods Company" began operations with the owners of the Crescent, Robert Burr Paterson (1853 or 1854-1911, president) and James Madison Comstock (1838-1918, the firm's vice-president), working with new partners, James Lawrence Paine, Jr., (1865-1943) and Comstock's son-in-law, Eugene Alexander Shadle (1869-1944).

Completed in 1908 to the designs of Spokane architect Loren L. Rand, the Spokane Dry Goods Company Warehouse operated continuously from 1908 until 1937, and had a hiatus during the years up to and including World War II, when the US Army utilized the three-acre volume to store materials. It reopened after the war as a storage space for the Crescent Department Store, operating in this capacity until c. 1990. (See Anna Harbine, Spokane Historical.org, “The Crescent Service Building,” accessed 02/27/2025.) Rand's design followed in the general tradition of H.H. Richardson's Romanesque Marshall Field's Wholesale Store (1887) in Chicago, although the Spokane building was one-story shorter and of lower cost, lacking the rusticated facing of the older structure.

Building Notes

Merchandise could be offloaded directly from the Northern Pacific Railway line located directly to the warehouse's north.

Loren Rand also designed a separate warehouse across an alleyway to the south, called the "Dry Goods Realty Building," (170 South Lincoln Street) that opened in 1909 to serve the Crescent Department Store.

PCAD id: 19956