World-Class Hotel

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photo: main din­ing room, Davenport’s restau­rant, c. 1911

In the lobby of the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, Washington, a gold plaque near the concierge’s desk states that Vachel Lindsay was once a guest here. Vachel who? A dead American poet, appar­ently. I’m a poet myself, a Canadian one. His name didn’t ring a bell. I did know about another Davenport guest, though — in fact, I had flown in to see him: a liv­ing, breath­ing fig­ure skater named Alexei Yagudin. A few months ear­lier, he had become an Olympic gold cham­pion, and now, in October 2002, he was in Spokane to per­form in Skate America. I wanted to catch another glimpse of the champ as well as the other glit­ter­azzi of the skat­ing world. In this hotel lobby, from his seat on a couch very near some nose­bleed– ticket – hold­ing eaves­drop­pers, Yagudin announced that because of a con­gen­i­tal hip con­di­tion, he was with­draw­ing from the men’s free skate, and from any fur­ther ama­teur skat­ing competition.

The media had been chas­ing the rumour of his retire­ment, at age twenty– one, for a while. And other rumours. His pre­de­ces­sors, fel­low Olympians from Russia, had fallen to prob­lem drink­ing after their Olympic tri­umphs. They still moved in and out of alco­hol treat­ment pro­grams. Yagudin him­self had had a sim­i­lar lapse before the Olympics in February, but pulled him­self up with the aid of his coach and chore­o­g­ra­pher, the fur-clad, iron-handed Tatiana Tarasova.

I was not stay­ing at the Davenport, which was way beyond my bud­get. I was just hang­ing among other fans, mostly female, in the lobby, where sched­uled pub­lic view­ings of skat­ing stars occurred. Tarasova was here, rec­og­niz­able by her extrav­a­gant wide-swinging mink coat. Already she had a new pupil in tow, a young American skater from the women’s divi­sion, Sasha Cohen.

The Davenport had been the top hotel in town for a few months, since a phil­an­thropist cou­ple had under­taken to restore it to its orig­i­nal 1920s glam­our and grandeur. One of their aims was to entice high-profile vis­i­tors and poten­tial cit­i­zens, and inter­na­tional figure-skating entourages. Apparently no expense was spared for the com­fort of guests like Alexei Yagudin. Thick pil­lars rose from behind silk-upholstered ban­quettes where lovers might remain clois­tered, or busi­ness deals might be clinched unob­served. There were pot­ted palms, a restored Italian mar­ble foun­tain, two immense orig­i­nal fire­places to linger by, and com¬fortable loveseats handy for lis­ten­ing in on other people’s con­ver­sa­tions. All the trap­pings of wealth and power were in place, as they were in 1924 when Spokane city fathers had agreed to invite the poet Vachel Lindsay to come and stay awhile. The same city fathers who evicted him from the hotel and the city five years later, in 1929 .

It all started when a lawyer named Ben Kizer, a great admirer of Vachel Lindsay’s work, per­suaded city offi­cials and Louis Davenport, owner of the hotel, to buck up Spokane’s image from back­wa­ter town to cul­tural metrop­o­lis by bring­ing Lindsay in as a guest. At the time, Lindsay was hugely pop­u­lar as a trou­ba­dour, trav­el­ling all over the United States, and well known as an author whose most famous book was Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems. Kizer assured the Spokane busi­ness com­mu­nity that Lindsay would be lit­er­ary bait, attract­ing other big names to Spokane. They ensconced him in Room 1129 , a suite large and grand enough for enter­tain­ing. Louis Davenport and Lindsay sup­port­ers would pay his hotel bills, and it was under­stood, though not so well by Lindsay, that he was to pay back the estab­lish­ment by giv­ing per­for­mances, writ­ing pieces glo­ri­fy­ing the city, and edu­cat­ing Spokane cit­i­zens on the spo­ken arts.

Lindsay took advan­tage of his priv­i­leged posi­tion, spread­ing his enter­tain­ment entourage down to the entire main floor of the Davenport: din­ing room, smok­ing room, lobby, even the ball­room. He com­posed nine ele­giac poems about Spokane, which were pub­lished in the city’s Spokesman-Review news­pa­per. They include “Under Spokane’s Brocaded Sun,” which begins with this stanza:

Under Spokane’s bro­caded sun, and her deeply embroi­dered moon
I walk on the Rim Rock ram­part put there by heaven’s hand,
Long before the city came, before the ocean or the land.
This Rim Rock has one east­ern notch for the river to run in
And the other notch is a water gate at first north­west;
Then south;
Grotesquely around, coils the ram­part, like a hoop-snake
Tail in mouth.

As a poet-performer, Lindsay brought excite­ment and a sort of glam­our to the Davenport and to Spokane. He dined every night in the main din­ing room. In the grand lobby and in his rooms, he cre­ated lit­er­ary games for the group who had gath­ered round him. One of the play­ers was Elizabeth Connor, an impres­sion­able twenty-three-year-old school­teacher, who, after a short romance, mar­ried the forty-five-year-old Lindsay. The wed­ding was held in his suite at the Davenport. Not long after­ward, Elizabeth lost her teach­ing job, their main source of income. The group’s antics in the hotel lobby and else­where, reported dili­gently in the Spokesman-Review, may have had some­thing to do with it.

Gradually Lindsay’s behav­iour became more bizarre and rude. He was always low on funds; his room and din­ing bills mounted. He wore the wrong clothes: “a rain­coat … when oth­ers were coat­less,” wrote Mildred Weston, author of Vachel Lindsay: Poet in Exile, pub­lished in 1987, “or a black shirt when black shirts were not com­mon.” For months, he dined with life-size French boudoir dolls and insisted that the wait­ers serve the dolls as if they were real peo­ple. And he failed to deliver celebri­ties to the city. His invi­ta­tions to Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis and oth­ers all went unheeded.

Vachel Lindsay’s star had been on the fade before he arrived in Spokane, some­thing Kizer had not picked up on. Lindsay’s books were no longer sell­ing well. He was trad­ing on the suc­cesses of his early works when the offer came from Spokane. And he was suf­fer­ing from “a dete­ri­o­rat­ing men­tal con­di­tion, exac­er­bated by dia­betes, petit mal epilepsy, and mid-life cri­sis,” accord­ing to Mildred Weston.

After the birth of their first child, Lindsay and his wife were politely evicted from the Davenport. They moved to a house in Browne’s Addition, a well-established mon­eyed neigh­bour­hood. Then, plagued by debts, they moved back to Lindsay’s child­hood home in Springfield, Illinois. In 1931 he com­mit­ted sui­cide by swal­low­ing Lysol.

The Davenport hotel, built near the rail­way sta­tion, went into decline in the 1940s, when motels became pop­u­lar among the grow­ing num­bers of peo­ple who trav­elled more by car than by train. New own­ers took over in the 1950s and made cos­metic changes, prob­a­bly to reflect the new era and com­pete with motel design. The hotel no longer attracted the cus­tomers it pre­ferred. When Elvis Presley and his entourage came to Spokane in August of 1957 , they stayed at the Ridpath, not the Davenport. By the 1970 s, after more changes of own­er­ship and more degrad­ing updates to the decor, the hotel went into bank­ruptcy. It closed down in 1985 , then sat vacant until the 1990 s, when the Friends of the Davenport came together to save it from demolition.

Vachel Lindsay is remem­bered in Springfield, Illinois, by a museum de¬voted to his pre-Spokane glory days. But all that remains of his Spokane tenure is the plaque in the lobby of the Davenport, and a brief men­tion in the index of Spokane’s Legendary Davenport Hotel, a book cel­e­brat­ing the rebirth of the hotel — although it was hard to find any­one in the reju­ve­nated Davenport who could even point out the gold plaque, let alone talk about how it came to be there.

Alexei Yagudin moved back to his home­town of St. Petersburg, Russia. After an emo­tional dec­la­ra­tion of retire­ment, he man­aged to skate sev­eral sea­sons with Stars on Ice by sim­ply not exe­cut­ing his Olympic-sized quads and triple triple jumps. He had a hip replace­ment late in 2007 and hoped to re-enter ama­teur com­pe­ti­tion. An injury in Germany dashed that hope. Though only die-hard skat­ing fans in Spokane would remem­ber him now, Yagudin remains a celebrity of sorts in Russia, appear­ing on the tv series The Ice Age. His arch-rival and team­mate in 2002 , Evgeni Plushenko, went on to win gold in 2006 , and sil­ver in the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.

These days the Davenport is doing rather well. Spokane itself is doing well, with­out either a poet lau­re­ate or a renowned ath­lete to keep vis­i­tors com­ing. Restorations of build­ings from a rich archi­tec­tural past are ongo­ing. The Fox Theatre has been revived, and it draws great crowds. The grand reopen­ing of this art deco build­ing included a per­for­mance by the trou­ba­dour Tony Bennett. The Fox had orig­i­nally opened in September 1931, a cou­ple of months before Vachel Lindsay’s death.

With all the restora­tion activ­ity, the city is a good can­di­date to host inter­na­tional events. After all, a daz­zling performing-arts the­atre will attract stars, and world-class hotels will house them, if only temporarily.