Built to meet the bakery demands of Spokane and implement the mass-production of bread and baked goods, the Spokane-Continental Bakery Building is historically significant for its association with broad city-wide trends that saw the growth of bakery warehouses throughout Spokane during the first half of the 20th-century. In addition, the bakery warehouse is architecturally significant as a fine representative of the industrial/commercial building type in Spokane. It was designed by Albert Held, one of Spokane’s most prolific and prominent master historic architects. Initially called the Spokane Bakery Company, the structure was first built in 1909 as a multi-level reinforced brick masonry construction industrial warehouse sited on the corner of Broadway Avenue and Post Street. A well-preserved example of the commercial/industrial warehouse building type, the Spokane Bakery Building was planned to be the “largest bakery plant in the northwest” with a construction cost estimated at $40,000 as reported in 1909 in a local Spokesman-Review newspaper article. In 1917, a one-story addition was built on the west wall of the 1909 building (the addition was later enlarged to three stories), and in 1920, a third building addition was constructed on the west face of the 1917 addition. The construction cost of the two additions was $150,000—a stratospheric financial outlay justified by the need for a large bakery warehouse to hold the “most modern type of oven…capable of turning out 5,000 loaves [of bread] an hour.” An anticipatory May 25, 1920 article in the SpokesmanReview claimed “this will be the only oven of its kind in Washington…the largest in the northwest…with more than 2,500 loaves…constantly baking.” Projections proved true, and by 1925, the Spokane-Continental Bakery Building was supplying bread and bakery products to an area from the North Cascade Mountains to central Montana, and from the Canadian border to northwestern Oregon. In 1925, the Continental Baking Company, a large national conglomerate, bought and operated the Spokane Bakery Company warehouse. Acquiring more and more wholesale bakeries, Continental grew with over 100 bakery warehouses nation-wide, and by 1973, was the “largest baking firm” in the United States—a testament to the success of one of their acquisitions—the Spokane Continental Bakery Building in Spokane. In a nod to several of the products produced in the building, it is now referred to as "The Wonder Building."

Management Agreement