Nearly a decade ago The Spokesman-Review of Spokane did an article in "The Milk Bottle", one of two which are sufficiently different to reserve a bit of ink. Their story was first published on Thursday, November 22, 2007. Read it below.
The result of
architectural kitsch, a trend which began in California in the 1920s, these thirty eight foot tall milk bottle shaped buildings were the brainchild of Paul Newport, then owner of Benewah Creamery, originally of St. Maries, Idaho. They were designed by the well known architectural firm of Whitehouse & Price, best known for having designed St. John's Episcopal Cathedral. The intent of the buildings, purely and simply, was to sell milk to kids.
Thirty eight feet tall and fifteen feet in diameter at the base, each also had an addition at the rear for coolers. They were used for many years as retail outlets for the creamery, but by 1985 the buildings were fifty years old and were no longer owned by the creamery. In 1985, the building on Garland Avenue was a second hand shop and the one on South Cedar street was used for storage.
In 2011 the Garland Avenue building was badly damaged by fire, but was rebuilt and reopened as a restaurant,
Mary Lou's Milk Bottle. This building, the South Cedar building, is today offices for
Mr. Chimney & Masonry, a chimney and masonry service and installation company. In 1986 it was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its being of an architectural style unique to the 1920s and 1930s.
Milk bottle building was retail outlet
for Benewah Creamery
By Stefanie Pettie - The Spokesman-Review
Long before “Got Milk?” became a ubiquitous national ad campaign for the dairy industry, it could easily have been the motto for the Benewah Milk Bottle at 321 S. Cedar in Spokane.
Actually, the milk bottle building really didn’t need any words to get the message across. Just look at it. Message understood.
The 38-foot-tall, stuccoed structure is 15 feet wide at its base and is an example of mimetic architecture, a style which creates structures depicting non-architectural objects (teapots, animals, etc.)
The Benewah Milk Bottle was built in 1935 – as was its sister structure at 802 W. Garland – as a retail outlet for creamery operator and merchant Paul E. Newport. Newport came to Spokane in 1922 from St. Maries, where he had started his dairy products business, the Benewah Creamery Co., named for Chief Benewah of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.
Originally, he planned to build six milk bottle buildings in Spokane at a cost of about $3,700 each, but only completed the two. To celebrate their opening, Newport sponsored a soap box derby on the Post Street hill, just below the Garland Avenue store – an annual event which continued for years.
In addition to a plant which produced an assortment of dairy products, Newport had a half-dozen or so other traditional-looking retail outlet stores in the area, the last one of which closed in 1978. The Benewah Creamery Co. was defunct by 1979.
The store on Garland has since been a secondhand store and today, Mary Lou’s Milk Bottle sandwich, burger and ice cream store operates at the site. The Benewah Milk Bottle on Cedar, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was vacant for a number of years, has been used as a storage space and today is home to the Spokane County Democratic Central Committee.
The well-known local architectural film of Whitehouse and Price made something of a whimsical leap from their other more stately architectural projects when they created the novelty milk bottle buildings back in the ‘30s. These delightful examples of literalism in advertising – where function, structure and material are less important than their representational quality – contrast significantly with Whitehouse and Price’s grand Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hutton Settlement, Spokane Civic Building/Chamber of Commerce on Riverside in downtown Spokane and various homes and college administration buildings in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana.
But, surely, none of those other structures can put a smile on your face by just catching a glimpse of them – or make you long for a moo-stache of your very own.
From The Spokesman-Review