Gallery then and now: Then and now: Hotel Coeur d’Alene – December 26th, 2021

Jacob Goetz, born in Frankfurt in 1853, was one of Spokane’s most colorful characters. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager and arrived in the Northwest in the mid-1870s, around the time city founder James Glover claimed the city that was to become Spokane.

In 1881, Goetz and his business partner Harry Baer began operating saloons, restaurants, and lodging establishments, usually in large tents, near railroad construction stores across northern Idaho and western Montana. His shops would move with the workers as they lay the tracks in the area.

Around 1883, Goetz and Baer began serving miners who were pouring into the Coeur d’Alene mining area.

Goetz, now nicknamed “Dutch Jake,” began feeding the miners, many of whom nearly broke or starved a percentage of whatever they found in the winter of 1884. He staked Phil O’Rourke and Noah Kellogg, who eventually discovered the ore deposit that would become the Bunker Hill mine. On a tip from O’Rourke, Goetz and another miner discovered the Sullivan Mine, another of the region’s most profitable mines. Goetz’s stake was more than $ 200,000, a fortune he shared with Bear.

Goetz helped design the cities of Kellogg and Wardner, both of which were named after friends of his.

Goetz and Baer saw miners go to Spokane for entertainment, and in 1887 they built the four-story Frankfurt Block, a hotel, casino, and saloon on the southwest corner of Main and Howard Brand from 1889.

Underinsured for their losses, Goetz and Bär erected a huge tent with the inscription “Dutch Jake’s Beer Garden”, rebuilt the Frankfurt quickly after the fire, but lost it in the financial panic of 1893 to Bank Baer took over the four-story Loewenberg building on Spokane Falls Boulevard and Howard Street. It was built for a dry goods store, but the partners turned it into the Hotel Coeur d’Alene. The couple successfully converted their saloon into a soft drink bar in an effort to survive Prohibition.

Goetz died in 1927 and Baer in 1932. The Spokesman Review named the couple “Spokane’s leading suppliers of pioneering pleasures”.