Take Southeast Boulevard up the hill enough times and you'll pass a patch of trees just south of 20th and Perry without ever noticing what's inside it. Most drivers do. But cut into that wooded slope is a run of 63 concrete steps that has quietly moved more Rockwood residents down to South Perry than any sidewalk in the neighborhood, and nobody, including the people who've spent years trying to find out, can say for certain who built it or why.
That gap in the record is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what those stairs are about to prove this Saturday.
A Boulevard Built to Slow You Down
Ask anyone on the Rockwood Neighborhood Council why the streets up here refuse to run in a straight line and you'll get some version of the same answer: that was the point. The Olmsted Brothers, the same firm behind Spokane's park system, laid Rockwood Boulevard through the basalt bluffs on purpose, curving the road around outcroppings and old ponderosa pine stands so drivers would have no choice but to slow down. It worked well enough that the boulevard and the historic district around it landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, prized as much for that deliberate, unhurried geometry as for the Tudor Revival and Classical Revival homes lining it.
It's a neighborhood engineered to reward patience behind the wheel. Which makes it strange that the fastest way out of it has never involved a car at all.
Nobody Actually Knows Who Built the Stairs
The Perry Street Stairs connect Rockwood Terrace, the cluster of streets above including Overbluff Drive, down to the Perry District below. City parks and streets departments maintain them, added a center handrail sometime in the 1980s, but neither has any record of who poured the original concrete or when. The most-repeated theory, pieced together by Spokane historian Gene Cohen and preservationist Linda Yeomans, is that the stairs went in around 1911, a year after the Rockwood Terrace development broke ground, so residents up top could reach a streetcar line down in Perry District rather than the one already running along Rockwood Boulevard itself, built in 1908.
Cohen has spent years chasing the answer, poring over Spokesman-Review archives back to 1910 in the process of researching his own house. He hasn't found it.
Those stairs are the last great mystery of Spokane.
That's not a knock on the neighborhood's record-keeping. It's a small, specific reminder that the walking routes people actually use rarely show up in the same historical paper trail as the boulevards and cathedrals do. Nobody wrote down the stairs because nobody thought a shortcut needed explaining. They just used it.
What Waits at the Bottom
The reason generations of Rockwood residents kept using it is that Perry District earns the walk. It's close enough to reach on foot from most of the neighborhood's southern half, and it's built around a strip of independent businesses rather than a shopping center:
- Perry Street Brewing, a taproom that anchors the district's south end
- South Perry Pizza, a slice-and-pie spot a few doors down
- Grain Shed, a bakery and taproom working with regionally grown grain
- A rotating lineup of indie coffee shops and boutiques along Perry Street itself
- A weekly farmers market that runs through the growing season
Rockwood residents headed the other direction, west toward Grand Boulevard, land at Manito Tap House instead, a craft beer and gastropub spot that's become the neighborhood's other default gathering point. Between the two, most of Rockwood's actual social life happens outside its own borders, on foot, in a ten-minute radius most maps never label.
This Saturday, the Bottom of the Stairs Gets Loud
For 22 years, that walk down to Perry District had one predictable exception: the third Saturday in July, when South Perry Together closed three blocks of Perry Street for its annual street fair. Last September, the fair broke that pattern for the first time, shifting its 23rd annual run to a fall date after the 2024 fair had been canceled outright when the volunteer base needed to run it couldn't be assembled. A City of Spokane Tourism and Cultural Investment grant helped bring it back, and that relaunch pulled in more than 130 artisan and food vendors and drew an estimated 8,000 visitors to Perry Street, with Grant Park hosting a Kids Zone that included a petting zoo and a city fire engine.
The South Perry Street Fair is a true celebration of community.
That's how South Perry Together president Michelle Weaver described the move when organizers announced it last year, and the fair is holding its new fall slot again this year, set for Saturday, September 26. The sponsor list carries over too: Perry Street Brewing, South Perry Pizza, and Grain Shed all appear alongside Avista, Horizon Credit Union, and Global Credit Union as the businesses underwriting the day.
Why the Walk Down Beats the Drive In
Here's where the stairs stop being trivia and start being useful. The fair closes Perry Street between 9th and 12th Avenue to vehicle traffic for the day, and anyone driving in from Rockwood is looking at street parking on the surrounding residential blocks, competing for space with a crowd that ran close to 8,000 last year alone. Anyone walking down from Rockwood Terrace through the Perry Street Stairs, or down Rockwood Boulevard itself toward Perry, skips that entirely and lands close to Grant Park, right where the Kids Zone booth sits at 10th and Perry.
It's the one Saturday a year when the neighborhood's oldest, least-documented piece of infrastructure does exactly what it was apparently built to do: get people from the top of the hill to the bottom faster than a car full of circling drivers looking for a curb.
Rockwood's postcard version is the boulevard, the pillars, St. John's Cathedral rising over the northwest corner. That version is real and worth the walk on its own. But the neighborhood's actual daily rhythm, the one that gets people down to a Saturday brewery patio or a farmers market stand without touching a car key, runs through a staircase nobody agreed on the origin of and a street fair that keeps proving, one September at a time, how much foot traffic still flows through it.
If the way Rockwood actually moves, stairs and all, sounds like the kind of neighborhood fit you've been looking for, Chelsey Graves and Graves Re Group know these streets past the postcard version. Reach out anytime to talk about what it's like to live here day to day, not just what the listing photos show.
