 Located two miles north of downtown Spokane, Corbin Park
is the only Local Historic District in Spokane. The site was once
a fairgrounds with a central racetrack. In 1889 a plat of the
Corbin Park Addition included the former racetrack as a park in the
center of the residential district. In 1916 a formal park design
was prepared by the Olmsted Brothers, Landscape Architects of Brookline,
Massachusetts. Today, most of the park has been adapted for
current use as a baseball diamond and playground areas.
The eighty-six houses built facing Corbin Park represent a wide
variety of architectural styles from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century. The
state of preservation of these homes is evidence of the effectiveness of
Corbin's community planning efforts and also of subsequent utilization
of good landscape architecture. Homes in the district range from
imposing Victorian to the modest bungalow and they typify the homes
built in the Northwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century.
The success and
revitalization of Corbin Park, Spokane's only Local Historic District, is due to its very active residents.
Calling themselves a "historic neighborhood" rather than
simply a historic district, Corbin Park is a cohesive, strong
neighborhood built around a grand historic park.
 The
Spokane Register Hillyard Historic Business District, commonly known as
the “Market Street” District, is a contiguous façade of commercial
block buildings erected between 1901 to 1948. The simple one and
two-story buildings represent the construction, materials and design of
early twentieth century commercial structures associated with a typical
working-class town such as Hillyard, a community platted in 1892. In
that same year the Great Northern Railroad began construction of its
Western Regional Terminal Facility, and its huge rail yard and
locomotive shops. With strong economic ties to activities and business
generated by Great Northern, Hillyard continued to expand as the
railroad prospered. Early on, the Market Street District became
Hillyard’s center for business activity and trade in the railroad
town. With the final closure of the rail servicing facility and shops in
1982, commercial trade in Hillyard suffered and hundreds of employees
lost their jobs. Yet
despite these lean years, the Market Street District has continued to be
the commercial center of Hillyard, and it remains the heart of the
community’s hopes for economic revitalization.
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