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It was the first day of middle school in Sandpoint when 12-year-old Justice took her first vape hit in the girls’ bathroom. She thought vaping would make her popular. Damien started vaping in middle school to ease his stress. By the time he got to high school in Nampa he wasn’t able to catch his breath during exercise. Chase started vaping with his friends in Jerome when he was 12, then he became so addicted he was expelled from his high school for multiple vaping-related offenses.

Justice, Damien and Chase’s stories are not unique. One in five Idaho teens has tried vaping at least once. And according to Idaho medical experts, Idaho kids are vaping as early as age seven.

Idaho Public Television has launched KNOW VAPE, a statewide campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of youth vaping in Idaho. Watch the documentary, Nic Sick, which airs tonight at 7pm online & on Idaho Public Television.

Hey friends! Did you know there was almost a shopping mall in downtown Boise? Today's story, written by Sharon Fisher, leads you through this moment in Boise history. Enjoy!

Stand at 8th and Front Streets, facing north (towards the foothills), and think what lies beyond: the Grove Hotel, the Idaho Central Arena, Grove Plaza, the Capital City Farmers Market, the Egyptian Theatre, 8th Street’s restaurant row, Main + Marketplace (Capitol Terrace), Freak Alley – all the way up the four major blocks to Bannock, left to 9th Street and right to Capitol Boulevard.

Now imagine all of that gone, replaced by an almost 1 million-square-foot, two-story, enclosed shopping mall.

Not that long ago, that was almost downtown Boise.

It came in like a wrecking ball

It’s said that history is written by the victors, and the Boise downtown mall is no exception. “Success has a million fathers, while failure is an orphan,” quoted John Brunelle, executive director of the Capital City Development Corp. (CCDC), Boise’s redevelopment agency, where he notes that few of the people who work there today were even alive when buildings were torn down in the 1960s. “I don’t think you’re going to find anyone who will say that we, or city leaders, should have built a downtown mall.”

But it isn’t fair to blame Boise’s urban renewal agency of the time, the Boise Redevelopment Agency (BRA), the predecessor of the CCDC, Brunelle said. “The organization was carrying out the wishes of the elected officials in City Hall,” he said. “BRA wouldn’t have the power to determine a matter like that. It came from the Mayor’s office and the City Council.”

All that stipulated, what brought in the notion of a downtown mall in the first place? In a word, money.

“Urban renewal was not an Idaho concept,” said Dan Everhart, State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) outreach historian for the Idaho Historical Society. “It was a national program to invest federal dollars in what were considered ‘blighted’ parts of the country, usually inner-city neighborhoods where working-class white folks and often racial minorities lived. It was a healthy mix of the paternalistic ‘everyone should have a house in the suburbs’ idea mixed with racism mixed with good intent.”

That’s not to say that urban renewal wasn’t needed in some cities. “There were people living in conditions that were unhealthy and unsanitary,” Everhart acknowledged. But urban renewal scraped away vibrant, existing neighborhoods – many of them inhabited by people of color – and replaced them with either high-rise project-style housing, amenities such as football stadiums, or highways, he said.

It was the American Rescue Plan Act of the day, but focused on buildings. And near the end of the urban renewal era, Boise city officials decided they wanted a piece. They formed BRA and went to town.

“Boise came really late to the game,” about 1965, Everhart said. “Urban renewal elsewhere started right after the war, or even before the war. Now Boise says, ‘Hey, what about us? We could have blight! There’s got to be a way to spend this federal money! We need a downtown mall!’ We essentially had to invent a blighted Boise to justify an infusion of federal funds. And so we did.”

But to provide the tabula rasa necessary for major redevelopment such as a mall, what was already there had to go. Even before the urban renewal craze, Boise’s desire for modernity had led it to demolish some of the downtown’s most striking buildings, such as the 1893 Boise City Hall, torn down in 1953.

Now, Boise officials started flattening downtown with a vengeance, starting with the area north of Main Street.

“For the most part, we succeeded in tearing down, while failing to build up,” Everhart said. “In some places in the country, they wiped the slate clean and then built in its place in concurrent motions. In Boise, we demolished and then waited until private investment, decades later, would rebuild.”

“BRA was doing what a lot of similar agencies were doing in other cities, following a kind of ill-fated notion that the first thing to do is destroy buildings and start planning what you want to build,” Brunelle said. “It proved to be backwards thinking and what everyone has learned from.”

But at the time, the result was that blocks and blocks of downtown were reduced to dirt lots. “In west downtown, there’s a sea of surface parking that is a direct result of the urban renewal movement,” Everhart said. BRA wasn’t responsible for all of it, but it was the same mentality that led to demolitions that still have not been rebuilt, he said.

And it’s still going on, said Brittney Scigliano, president of Preservation Idaho, in an email message, citing the Afton, which was demolished about a decade ago. “It was a great warehouse, and instead of turning it into apartments or condos, they demolished it and started new,” she said. “This is the type of unfortunate choices that Boise made in the 1970s. We lost the inventory of warehouse and other large buildings that could have been made into housing or retail through adaptive reuse. Instead, it all went into the landfill.”

“Every single surface parking lot was once a built-on property,” Everhart said. “And if you look at aerial views of the city from the 1950s, some may have been smaller commercial buildings, or even houses. But there were buildings. That was our downtown core. This was not undeveloped land. This was densely developed downtown Boise. It was a lot of money, and heartache, and loss of culture and history, to do almost nothing in terms of reinventing the downtown experience.”

The result was an exodus to the suburbs, not just by retail but by residential and commercial as well, Everhart said. “Who wants to have their office in the one building that still has offices, while in every direction there’s nothing but surface parking?”

Urban renewal became a self-fulfilling prophecy, Everhart said. “We’ll make downtown blighted if it isn’t already.”

A place to shop

Boise had never been known as a shopping destination. In fact, said former Boise mayor Dirk Kempthorne, during the Christmas season there used to be buses to Salt Lake City taking Boiseans to shop. And it seemed like the city was one of the last places in the world to get a shopping mall, said former Boise planner Jerome Mapp, who moved to Boise in 1980 as a facility planner for the Capital Mall. Even Nampa had one, Karcher Mall, built in 1965. The big debate was whether the Boise shopping mall should be situated downtown, or west of the city, in the suburbs.

Some retailers, such as Seattle-based Nordstrom, had expressed interest in locating in Boise, but city officials at the time either weren’t interested or couldn’t put a project together in time. In fact, some retailers themselves weren’t interested in a downtown Boise mall, Kempthorne said. “’Please, retailers, come build your mall downtown, we will level downtown,’ and retailers said ‘That would be a huge mistake, and we’re not coming. It won’t fit,’” he recalled.

A 1985 report written by the American Institute of Architects’ Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT) also laid the blame on retailers. “The well-intentioned plans to revitalize downtown Boise through the insertion of a major regional shopping center have not failed because of the lack of workable access,” the report noted. “The reason is most likely corporate policy decisions by major retailers which favor suburban locations with less restrictive expandable sites, free surface parking, and direct access from the existing interstate highways over locations in older downtown districts.”

In addition to being a two-story giant building, the downtown Boise mall was supposed to mimic Spokane, with walkways on the second level connecting the buildings, Mapp said. “Gerbil tunnels,” Kempthorne scoffed. “I was never a big fan of putting those in. Take the pedestrians off the street and put them in tubes.”

The downtown-vs-suburb mall debate had been going on since at least the 1970s. In 1974, Harper’s Magazine published an article called Tearing Down Boise, noting a number of objections to the planned downtown mall – at that time called “the megastructure” – ranging from the challenge of getting shoppers to come back downtown to concerns about traffic and parking.

“BRA has no fallback position, no alternative plan,” Harper’s wrote. “As far as BRA is concerned, the megastructure must be built, come hell or high water.”

The decision of 1985

The Boise mayoral election of 1985 was essentially a referendum on the mall siting decision, once and for all.

Kempthorne campaigned as a proponent of the suburban mall, and he and a number of city council members of the same opinion were elected. “There was a wonderful young couple who circulated petitions and brought 10,000 signatures to City Hall, to ‘release downtown and build a mall outside,’” he recalled. “I was there at that particular meeting. They were dismissed. ‘Thank you very much, but we know better.’ Ultimately, I got a lot of support.”

That raised the question of how to unwind the megastructure plan. Some people felt that the first thing to do was fire all the BRA people. “I said if we did that, we’ll have created our own set of critics sitting on the sidelines hoping we’ll fail,” Kempthorne said. “Before building buildings, we need to build cooperation." Brunelle also credited developer Peter O’Neill, BRA chairman of the board from 1984-1987, for turning the situation around.

Not everyone was happy with Kempthorne’s plan to abandon the downtown mall. “There were a number of retailers who were upset with me,” he recalled. “’In your zeal to build a mall, you will destroy downtown.’ No, building a mall will release downtown to fulfill its destiny," he said.

Then Kempthorne called a press conference in the center of the dirt lots – after asking the park service to soften the concrete-like soil so he could actually break ground – and announced, “This will become the center of downtown Boise.”

That spot became the fountain for Grove Plaza, and the site for the annual Christmas tree. “When I think of Dirk putting this tree in the gravel parking lot, and what it looks like now – activities almost 24 hours a day,” Mapp said.

The next step was to start filling in the vacant lots. Other existing historic buildings, starting with the Alexander Building, were revitalized.

A convention center had eluded the city for 25 years, Kempthorne said. He called a meeting for every entity that had jurisdiction authority on the convention center – city council, county commissioners, the auditorium district, Ada County Highway District, and the redevelopment agency – and he told them all to come to City Hall, and bring their lawyers.

“’We’re now going to discuss real property,’ so we asked the press to withdraw,” Kempthorne recalled. “The door was closed. ‘Everybody that can make a decision to make this convention center a reality is in this room. You cannot tell me you have to consult with your attorney because they’re right here. I will not open that door to once again announce that we’ve failed. You open the door, and you announce the failure.’ We got down to it, and we struck a deal.”

Idaho’s living room

Having created the space, city officials needed to bring people to it. “After 6 o’clock, you had restaurants and bars, but there really wasn’t anything to do downtown,” Mapp said. So they created events such as Alive After Five and First Thursday, Kempthorne said.

Kempthorne also looked for ways to play up Boise’s role in the state. “When we had the centennial, one of the projects I initiated was I wanted every county’s emblem on the historic lampposts,” he said. “I wanted to see that this is their capital city, not just ‘Boise.’ It really began a sense of welcome.” In fact, some counties had to go out and design an emblem just for the purpose, because they’d never had one before, he added.

The 80-page R/UDAT study laid out a number of other recommendations for Boise to revitalize its downtown, ranging from an 8th Street pedestrian mall to building a hotel and convention center.

In particular, the R/UDAT study recommended making sidewalks pedestrian-friendly, passing by retail or offices rather than parking structures so people wouldn’t be walking down a line of cars parked in buildings, Kempthorne said.

The rise of historic preservation

One upside of the whole urban renewal fiasco – Harper’s described downtown Boise as looking like “it has recently been visited by an exceedingly tidy bombing raid conducted by planes that cleaned up after themselves” – was the spawning not just of Boise’s historic preservation community, but historic preservation efforts nationwide, Everhart said.

“Citizens were confronted with the loss of all these places that meant something to them,” Everhart said. “Certainly not everyone, but a lot of people were disturbed by that and questioned the value of the wholesale erasure. It was a catalyst for the creation of the preservation movement.”

The National Historic Preservation Act, enacted in 1966, which created both national and state historic preservation offices (including Idaho's State Historic Preservation Office in 1972), was a direct response to urban renewal and highway construction throughout the urban centers, Everhart said.

That was true of Preservation Idaho as well, also founded in 1972, Scigliano said. “There were many influential people who had grown up in Boise and realized that their history was being lost to demolition,” she said.

One of them was the late Joan Carley, mother of Clay Carley, general manager of Old Boise and developer of several residential projects downtown. “Historic preservation was near and dear to her,” he said, adding that it was not a field she studied but something she felt “in her bones.” “She had a natural instinct to say that historic buildings make for great places, and getting rid of them is for a less-great place.”

Moreover, Joan Carley felt that a mall didn’t belong downtown, Carley said. “They’re not natural,” he said. “What she really liked most about places was authenticity.” Malls are a structure contrived to bring people together to buy things, without much social benefit, he said. “If you want to build a mall, fine, but don’t do it downtown.”

At the same time, there was an effort to organize downtown property owners to decide what businesses were needed and where they should go, Carley said. “You don’t want five coffee shops,” he explained. “My mom wasn’t against the idea, but she thought it was impossible to execute and enforce. To socially engineer a downtown would not be successful.”

In fact, Old Boise itself was a response to all the demolition, Carley said. His mother bought three buildings – the Pioneer Building, the old Idaho Statesman office, and the telephone building – to preserve them. “In those days, it seemed like a lot of money, but compared to today, they were not very expensive acquisitions,” he said. “I think the biggest acquisition she made was maybe $50,000. In the mid-1970s, that seemed like a lot of money.” Moreover, the buildings needed work and further investment. “She bought a pig in a poke, and hoped architecture would rule the day and the rest of the neighborhood would follow.”

At the time, the neighborhood was undeveloped, to put it kindly. “There was no retail. It was all bars. It was kind of seedy,” Carley said. “She just kept reinvesting with the instinct that by making these great buildings cleaner, and someplace someone would want to have a business in, success would follow.” It took her 13 years to break even, he said.

But other property owners, wanting to be part of the improvement, followed suit. “Lo and behind, the Basque Block emerges,” Carley said. In 1978, Old Boise was put on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district, followed in 1980 by the city creating its own historic district, he said. “That gave it a purpose, a value it didn’t have previously,” he said. “It helped other owners say this could be a nice place.” And today? “I think she’d be thrilled to know people are living downtown,” he said.

Even after the downtown mall plan was scrapped, there was still some pressure to demolish old buildings. “I said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Kempthorne said, noting that some people wanted to tear down the Union Block – designed by John E. Tourtellotte and on the National Register – and the Adelmann Building, at Capitol and Idaho. “I said, ‘That stops now. You’re destroying the history of downtown.’” The current system, which intermingles new buildings with historic ones, retains the history and footprint and culture of downtown, he said.

Happily ever after

In 1988, Boise did get its mall. Kempthorne went to the groundbreaking, three miles outside of downtown. “It was a frigid day,” he recalled. “We’d always heard, ‘It’ll be a cold day in Boise before we see a mall built.’ And it was cold.”

Kempthorne did make one request of John Price, the developer of the mall. “He announced he was going to name it ‘Boise Towne Center,’” he said. “And I went to John and said, ‘I must ask you not to call it “Towne Center.” That’s downtown.’ So that’s how it became ‘Boise Towne Square.’”

The evening before the mall officially opened, it held a soft opening with a banquet and the Boise Philharmonic. “Everyone could stroll through the mall,” Kempthorne said. “We had a sense of feeling good at what we had finally accomplished.”

The same thing happened in 1990 when the Boise Centre opened. “We toasted it with champagne,” Kempthorne said. “Boise began to realize it could do great things. There was no longer this atmosphere of hitting the walls. There was a bounce in our step, our confidence grew, and we became the capital city Idaho deserved.”

Since then, CCDC has attracted $2 billion in construction value downtown, Brunelle said. And some of those projects couldn’t have been built without urban renewal, Everhart acknowledged. “We couldn’t have had some of the buildings we have today without it,” he said.

What if the mall had been built?

In an alternate reality, if the downtown mall had been built, what would downtown Boise be like today?

“Can you imagine if downtown was one large building or group of buildings, all in the same style, with large parking lots?” Scigliano asked. “When you see the vibrancy of our downtown – much of which still has no legal protection – you can see what would have been lost. The diversity of architectural styles and sizes of buildings, and buildings from different eras, is what makes for a successful, busy, economically viable downtown area.”

Having a mall there would also have made it tough to build the Connector, Mapp pointed out, and would have made it difficult for traffic moving north and south. “When they put the Connector in there, it took a while, almost 30 years, for the Idaho Transportation Department to put in a sufficient number of signals to get pedestrians to go north and south,” he said. With the mall there, “what we would lose is that value of community,” he said. “You look at a mall, and people congregate there, but it's totally different from being outside. It would have been very sterile.”

Even if the downtown mall had been built, it might itself have been redeveloped, Brunelle said. “I’m guessing by now it would have become adapted reuse,” he said. “Based on their mentality back in the 1950s and 1960s, they might have torn it down by now,” he said, noting that it was a huge structure for heating and cooling. “I can’t imagine it would have been successful for very long.” As examples, Boise Towne Square, as well as Nampa’s Karcher Mall, are themselves being redeveloped into mixed-use projects, including residential, while The Village has a master plan including residential, he said.

And Kempthorne thinks the downtown Boise mall would never have been built in the first place. “The major retailers said, ‘We are not coming.’” In fact, he paid a visit to the Nordstrom brothers in Seattle, asking them to come to Boise. “They said, ‘We appreciate the visit, but we have moved on,’” he recalled, and they described they felt like a guy who was interested in a girl who continually ignored them. “’That’s how we feel Boise has been to us,’” he related. When Kempthorne returned to Boise, he bought a couple of boxes of Idaho chocolates and sent them with a note reading, “Please don’t forget your old flame,” he said. (Boise eventually did get a Nordstrom Rack, in 2012.)

“Downtowns are unique,” Mapp said. “It’s the heart of the city. As a heart, downtown has to beat, and it has to reinvent itself to keep that heart beating and keep that flow of individuals in your downtown.”

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

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This story was written by Sharon Fisher. Sharon is a digital nomad specializing in history and tourism. Check out her book out about the history of Kuna, Idaho. You can read more of her work here.

PS - In the next few months we'll get into some other stories related to this, like Billy Fong & the Boise Hole. If you've got stories/info about those, let me know!

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