The Childhood Express

The wagon on Spokane Falls Boulevard

The handle of the wagon comes down to the pavement as a white slide. Children reach the bottom and go back around to climb the stairs again. Above them stands the bed of a red Radio Flyer, 12 feet high, 12 feet wide and 27 feet long. It weighs 26 tons and is built of steel and reinforced concrete. KXLY gave its length with the handle as 50 feet. Monkey bars hang beneath the bed. The edges stand 43 inches high, with the rounded pinch points removed, and a curb runs 6 to 10 feet out from the sculpture. The city rates it to hold as many as 300 people, at 100 pounds per square foot. The Radio Flyer lettering is there because the artist, Ken Spiering, got permission to use the logo from the company’s president.

Its formal title is The Childhood Express. Most of Spokane calls it the Red Wagon. It sits on the park’s southern boundary along Spokane Falls Boulevard, between the First Interstate Center for the Arts and the Looff Carrousel, and the Spokane River Centennial Trail passes it on the way west. The city’s own page suggests parents take a park bench while the children play, or slide down the handle themselves. “Part of the beauty of the red wagon is you don’t have to wander too far into the park to see it,” said Spokane Parks spokeswoman Fianna Dickson in 2022.

A Junior League of Spokane plaque on the sculpture is dated August 18, 1990. It reads: “This sculpture is dedicated to Spokane’s children, as a reflection of the past, created in the present, to last into the future.”

A son’s wagon and a centennial

The Junior League, a women’s service organization founded in Spokane in 1925, started the project in 1989. For Washington’s state centennial it asked for a work of art that would pay tribute to the children of the past, present and future. The piece was made for the Centennial Celebration of Children. The Sculpture Walk brochure describes it as a gift to the children of Spokane from the Junior League, many local businesses and the Spokane Arts Commission.

Spiering said the idea came once he stopped searching for a tribute to children and watched his son running a little Radio Flyer wagon. A wagon might stand for childhood, he reasoned, if it were big enough for children to play in. He calls the red wagon the universal symbol of childhood. “It does touch the child in all of us,” he told The Spokesman-Review in 2017. In his proposal he wrote that the piece would draw a warm smile, encourage children to join in, and make visitors to Spokane and Riverfront Park want to return.

Spiering already had work in and around the park. He made The Call and the Challenge in 1986 for the centennial of Sacred Heart Medical Center, and later made the fish on the Spokane Convention Center.

Seventeen-hour days

He began in February 1990, building the wagon and installing it on the site. His son Nathan worked on it too, and is recorded hoisting the front yoke during construction. Spokane Historical says the job took Spiering a full year of 17-hour days. A photograph from opening day in 1990 shows him sitting up on his creation. By his own account the work was completed January 31, 1991. The sources date the piece in different ways. Several give 1989, the centennial year it was made for. The Sculpture Walk brochure gives 1990.

He soon learned what the public would do to it. “The first few times I had been up there where the paint on the interior of the wagon bed was essentially scraped clean from all the people scratching through it with their names and everything, I was a little heartsick,” he told the Inlander. He kept coming back all the same. “I would sit and watch people play on it. It always gave me a lift.”

Spiering tells a story about his niece in St. George, Utah. She was playing with a small child who kept talking about the great big wagon in Spokane. The girl finally produced a picture of it and said her uncle had made it.

Spokane Historical and Visit Spokane both call it the world’s largest Radio Flyer wagon, and Spokane Historical reports that USA Today readers voted it the top roadside attraction in Washington. In July 2017 Radio Flyer marked its centennial in downtown Chicago with its own giant wagon. That wagon had been built twenty years earlier for the company’s 80th anniversary and was inspired by a 1930s World’s Fair display. The Spokesman-Review measured the two. Spokane’s is just as long and only a foot narrower, with a slide besides, but the Chicago wagon holds the place in the Guinness book of World Records.

Paint, graffiti and a talk-show host

In 2010 Conan O’Brien came through on his “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.” After the show he told his Spokane fans only, “Meet me at the big red wagon.” According to KXLY, they did.

In October 2011 vandals covered the wagon with religious messages. “It’s very rare that we see vandalism based on religion,” said Craig Butz, the park manager. “We’ve only re-painted it once as general maintenance. We weren’t prepared to do this.” He expected to repaint it the next spring for more than $3,000, with a sign painter hired for the ornate lettering and logos. The wagon stayed open through the cleanup.

The Junior League and the city marked the 25th anniversary in August 2015, with Spiering present. Lesley Culley, then president of the League, said the wagon “continues to fulfill its dedication statement.” Mayor David Condon noted that the Red Wagon had become the city’s official gift to visiting dignitaries. They receive smaller Radio Flyers filled with goods from local artisans.

On May 31, 2022, crews began stripping all of the paint and rust. The $73,000 job, done by Modern Construction and Consulting Services, also covered minor metal repairs and new primer and paint matched to the original. Sherwin-Williams donated the paint. The contractor found more damage along the way and donated the labor to fix it. Dickson said the wagon had been repainted only once since its construction and had never before received significant steel repairs.

The yellow caution tape came down at about 5 p.m. on a Saturday in early July 2022, in time for the holiday weekend. Jeremy Jasman waited at the foot of the slide for his daughter Jordan, 2. A family from Honolulu, in town for the U.S. Karate National Championships at The Podium, watched their son play on it after riding the SkyRide and the carrousel. Cadence Calvert, who grew up in Yakima and played on the wagon when visiting her grandparents, swung from the bars underneath. “It was just like when I was a kid,” she said.