Balkan Hotel 31 W. Main Street

HISTORIC NAME	Balkan Hotel
COMMON NAME	Community Building
DATE BUILT	c. 1908
ARCHITECT/BUILDER	C.E. Wentzel
PROPERTY STYLE	Commercial Vernacular
ON THE SPOKANE REGISTER	Yes - added 11/26/01
ON THE NATIONAL REGISTER	No
IN A DISTRICT	No
DISTRICT	No
NEIGHBORHOOD	Riverside

STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

The Balkan Hotel is historically significant as a Single Room Occupancy Hotel, a particularly popular type of housing during the economic boom that fueled Spokane’s explosive population growth in the first decade of the century. Single Room Occupancy Hotels like the Balkan, built in 1909, provided working class housing for the large numbers of itinerant laborers that flocked to Spokane to take advantage of expanding opportunities associated with the city's emergence as a regional transportation hub.  The east downtown neighborhood where this SRO was located became an enclave for immigrants arriving in Spokane from the the Balkan Peninsula, as the hotel's name suggests.  Together with the Balkan Servian Benevolent Society, located two blocks west, the Balkan Hotel served as a focal point for theneighborhood's Balkan immigrant community.

© 1997-2002 City of Spokane, Washington. All Rights Reserved.
Last Date Modified: December 15, 2005