High-tech core offers Spokane a recipe for success

Baked Alaska. This entertaining, high-contrast sweet
treat is the darling of cruise ship cuisine around the
world.

Steve Simmons
Special to The Spokesman-Review

It presents a piping hot, golden brown shell of baked
meringue, and then the diner encounters a thrilling
chill — the creamy, frozen ice cream center! An
imaginative variation on the Baked Alaska caused
national restaurant critics to rank the Pacific East
Restaurant of Amagansett, N.Y., as this summer’s
hottest spot on America’s map of dessert wizardry.

Similarly, Spokane could find itself on the national
urban development map for a unique downtown
speciality — the `Baked Alaska Building’ — where a
cool historic exterior is wrapped around a white hot
center of advanced telecommunications and
computer technology.

The crown jewel of such buildings, the equivalent of a
break-the-bank, nine-layer New York City-style
Baked Alaska wedding cake, is the legendary
Davenport Hotel.

Opening Monday after 16 darkened years, the
exterior is a glowing combination of historic brick,
molded terra cotta, countless stone carvings and an
elaborate onion dome entryway dripping with glass
panels and quaintly carved metal.

The interior technology, by contrast, is blazingly
advanced. There are two OC 12 fiber connections,
zones of popular 802.11 wireless for laptops, and a
subterranean Network Operations Center that
connects the ultrahigh bandwidth below decks to
state-of-the-art last mile wireless on the roof.

Just like any cruise ship’s dessert buffet, the
Davenport is surrounded by a delectable assortment
of complimentary pieces. Indeed, in the five years
since the Terabyte Triangle was launched,
Spokane’s building developers, working in
association with technology companies, universities,
and government organizations, have created what
may be the largest collection of `Baked Alaska
Buildings’ in North America.

From dozens of examples downtown, here are three
buildings that capture the scope, diversity and
charisma of this urban innovation.

Downtown’s most diverse technology core is found in
the Holley Mason building, a virtual microcosm of
innovation in the Inland Northwest. Technology
dominates, from the basement, where fiber from 180
Networks, XO and Qwest enters the building, to the
top floor, where a complete biotechnology laboratory
and development center has just served as the
launchpad for GenPrime’s new product against
Anthrax terrorism.

In between, there are technology tenants such as
ChoiceNet, INHS, the Information Technologies
Academy and new Biotechnology Academy for the
high school age group, and leading edge developer
Maplewood Software, which routinely ships code to
Microsoft.

The Holley Mason was built in 1905 as a hardware
store and warehouse and was Spokane’s first
fireproof building of reinforced concrete.
Nonetheless, it’s quite airy and decorative with its
tawny brick veneer, multi-story Italianate windows and
charmingly figured terra cotta trim.

Recently, a young Japanese urban planner, after
visiting Steam Plant Square, described it as "the
coolest place" he has seen in his 17-city tour of
America’s restored downtowns.

Architecturally, Steam Plant is a fusion, combining
the 1890 Seehorn building with the 1916 Central
Steam Plant by means of a newly constructed central
courtyard.

The Central Steam Plant delivers the great historical
drama, with twin 225-foot patterned-brick
smokestacks, massive arch-topped metal mullioned
windows, boilers, pipes, steel catwalks and titanic
interior coal bunker.

Today, however, connectivity has replaced coal to
fire the engines of commerce.

The Steam Plant is now home to some of Spokane’s
most advanced connectivity installations. The
building’s Network Operations Center is a
multimillion-dollar asset with elaborate provisions for
backup power, security and Internet server colloction
space, all supported by multiple OC 12 fiber
connection. This bandwidth bonanza is now heavily
used by many technology tenants — including
Contineo Technologies, ActiveServers Inc., ILF
Media and ThinkingCap Communications.

The Fernwell building, which pioneered the Terabyte
Triangle in 1997, has now become the epicenter of
specialized high volume Web traffic in today’s
downtown.

The building’s technology core is based on fiber
connections from Time Warner Telecom, 180
Networks, Qwest and XO, providing both heroic
throughput and massive redundancy to Fernwell’s
Internet traffic flow.

Fernwell is headquarters to Real Resume, which
processes more than 5 million Internet resumes per
year for national employment Web sites and of Home
Debut, which imports and exports a torrential stream
of multimedia data for the real estate industry.

There are also very heavy bandwidth users in more
traditional services, like accounting and law.

All this is wrapped in a spectacular historic package,
designed by architect Hermann Preusse and built in
1891.

Will Spokane acquire a new civic nickname as "The
Baked Alaska City?" Stranger things have happened.
And with the `Big Apple’ (New York) now a household
phrase and `Celery City’ (Kalamazoo) and `Crabtown’
(Annapolis) advancing rapidly — can `Baked Alaska’
be all that far behind?

Dr. Steve Simmons has been a professor of
computer science at Eastern Washington University
since 1990. He is the founder of the Terabyte
Triangle economic project.

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=071402&ID=s1182145&cat=section.business