L. J. Davis

TEARING DOWN BOISEOne day there may be nothing but a shopping center left of Boise, Idaho

ONLY TWICE in this century haveother Americans had much rea-

son to think, for good or ill, aboutthe modest metropolis of Boise, Ida-ho. The first time was in 1907, whenClarence Darrow unexpectedly per-suaded a local jury to acquit Big BillHaywood, the labor organizer, whohad been accused of hiring thebomb-murderer of a former IdahoGovernor. The second time was inthe 1950s, when Boise was shakenby a homosexual scandal that brieflymade it something of a nationallaughingstock. Now, unhappily, theplace is about to get a third crack atnotoriety. If things go on as theyare, Boise stands an excellent chanceof becoming the first American cityto have deliberately eradicated it-self.

Boise is the capital of Idaho, theseat of Ada County, and the onlysignificant business center betweenSalt Lake City, Utah, and Portland,Oregon, a distance of some 750miles. At the time of the 1970 censusit had a population of 74,990 peo-ple, 28,000 of them Mormons. Inaddition, there were about 7,000Basques-whose ancestors had beenimported to herd sheep-160 Amer-indians, 136 Japanese, 89 Chinese,

32 4 Filipinos, and 268 blacks, 69 of

whom were fortunate enough to holdjobs. The city is said to owe its cu-rious name to a group of wanderingFrench fur traders who stumbled onthe site in 1811, beheld the cotton-woods lining the river that woundthrough the broad alluvial plain atthe foot of the mountains, and im-mediately (if the heroic mural thatgraces the front of South Junior HighSchool is taken as an authority) be-gan hollering, "Les bois!,'-a logi-cal notion, considering the vast sage-brush desert these gentlemen hadbeen crossing for days on end. Boisestill styles itself "The City of Trees,"although at the moment it is in seri-ous danger of becoming The City ofStumps. Dutch-elm disease has ar-rived, and 600 of the city's 7,000majestic elms have recently died.

Despite its isolation and smallpopulation, Boise is a headquarterstown. The Boise Cascade corpora-tion has its main offices there, in alarge, squat new building con-structed of a material that local peo-ple politely refer to as "brown."Trees grow behind glass in its lob-by, while men with New York hair-cuts, carrying Italian briefcases,move in and out of the doors in aL. J. Davis's latest book is Walking Small,a novel, to be published by George Braziller,

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steady stream. Morrison-Knudsenone of the world's largest construetion companies, is headquartered OJthe other side of town; the Continental Life and Accident Companis renovating a structure on MailStreet; and J.R. Simplot, who madhis stack in dehydrated potatoes dUJing World War II, will locate hiheadquarters in a fourteen-story oifice building now going up nearbj

Boise treats big business with thsame tenderness with which Panamtreats ships. The working class is hImogeneous, industrious, and fierceldocile; people go to work at eighhead for home at five or later, anthe two-martini lunch, while not UJ

known, is not much in evidence. Tlcity has no slums worthy of tlname and, therefore, no militants.is rock-ribbed Republican territorperhaps the only reason Idaho curently has a Democratic Governis that his Republican predecessrashly tried to give the White CIOlMountain Range to a mining coml1ny. Boiseans still smoke Camedrink Scotch on the rocks, wear milskirts, and believe in progress. Tcompanies understandably find tlmoral climate helpful; they pgood wages, and their workers gigood value. The result is the ki

Why we selected the Napa Valley yearsago as our home forThe Christian Brotherstable wines.

Formore than a century, the Napa Valleynorth of San Francisco,has been acclaimed California's finest premium wine-growing area.

It was here on the hillsides of this verdant valley that we choseto build The Christian Brothers winery and aging cellars many yearsago. And to plant our vines.

Through the years, we have found scientifically why the earlyvintners instinctively brought the first rare European varietal grapecuttings here. The unique varied climate and soilsof the Napa Valleyprovide the distinctly different needs of each grape variety.

For instance, one area has more cool growing days and is a per-fect home for our Pinot Noir, the noble grape of Burgundy. Anotherhas more warm days and gives the proper sunshine to the CabernetSauvignon. The same is true for the Chenin Blancs and the Johann-isberg Rieslings and all of the other shy-bearing varietals we use inour table wines.

Of course, grapes are just part of our story.The Napa Valleyhasgiven us the quiet place we need to bring the wines to life ... slowly,patiently in our own way.A tradition of quality we will never change.

Long ago the Indians named our valley "Napa;' which meansplenty. We think of it now as meaning plenty of good grapes, andplenty of time to make our wines. You are always a welcome guestat the Christian Brothers' winery here.---~/~JSC.

34

CELLAR MASTER, THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERS, NAPA VALLEY, CALIFORNIAWorldwide Distributors: Fromm and Sichel. Inc. San Francisco, California

TEARING DOWN BOISEof economic vigor and social peacethat has become utterly alien tomuch of the rest of the country. YetBoise is a dying city.

ITIS DYING for the same reason somany other small American cities

are dying, have died, or will shortlybegin to die: an overdose of a fatalwitches' brew composed of automo-biles, greed, bad planning, good in-tentions, idiotic architecture, andcivic pride run wild. Depending onwhich way you come into town,Boise appears to consist exclusivelyof used-car lots or fast-food restau-rants, among the latter an incrediblechain called Sambo's, in whose res-taurants diners eat (guess what?)pancakes beneath cute, glassy mu-rals depicting episodes in the life ofthe weirdly yellowish (jaundice?hepatitis?) little hero of the once-popular nursery tale. In the part oiBrooklyn where I now live, a placelike that would be firebombed fifteenminutes after it opened its doors.

Downtown Boise gives the impression that it has recently been visiterby an exceedingly tidy bombing raicconducted hy planes that cleaned UIafter themselves. Main Street is virtually deserted. A few eerily patronless stores still stand on the nortlside, the offices above them emptywhile across the street a small inlanrsea of parking lots stretches as fasouth as the railroad tracks hVr

blocks away. The old Bouquet tavenis still there, with its heroic, golderoak bar, and a new office building igoing up a few hundred yards awa)but in the midst of all that desolatemptiness they look as forlorn abuffalo standing in the rain at tl1zoo. On the corner of EleventStreet, the Grand Hotel has beeobliterated by a California-style faelift of mansard roofs and gray stucceit has been renamed the Safari M·tor Inn.

Downtown still makes a bra-show of doing business in the pricipal canyon of trade along Ida}Street, but no one seems to be paing much attention; on a recewarm, bright Tuesday morning-perfect shopper's weather-a canonball, if fired the length of tlsidewalk, would have struck exactnineteen people. At six o'clockthe evening the town closes up COl

pletely, with light still in the skThen there is a fifteen-minute traf

Superblydesigned in therich anddecorativetradition of theRenaissance.Crafted in ;j"precious metals.')Ballpoint,$15.00. Withpencil, $30.00.

SHEAFFER®I i"J

SHEAFFER:dc:='~O'WIDE, ~_fiiiiim COMPANY.~ •.::,,~.~,>~_~,. .i+:~::::'.. ;J~

TEARING DOWN BOISE

jam on the roads leading west, to-ward the suburbs, where more thanhalf the county's population now lives-a traffic jam Boiseans find intoler-able, and they are thinking ofbuilding a whacking big freeway toeliminate it-and after that, the cen-tral business district belongs to thenewspapers blowing in the gutter,its vacant pavements illuminated bynew streetlamps topped by giant alu-minum coolie hats.

In the East the reason for much ofthe suburban exodus is coloredblack; in Boise it has four wheelsand honks. The automobile, how-ever, is only a passive instrument,the executor of a policy that has itsreal roots elsewhere.

Planning came late to Boise. Untilthe early Seventies, politics in thecity was of the time-honored good-ole-boy variety, with the Mayor andmembers of the city council goingabout their jobs as a sort of side-line to their private businesses. A fewyears ago a number of the city fa-thers stood to make a good deal ofmoney off the way the city wassprawling to the west, out into thebest farmland in the county, andthey saw nothing wrong with doingso. The Mayor himself was a promi-nent builder. "They had no notionwhatever of what the planning pro-cess entails," said a local official. "Itwas a simple matter of featheringtheir own nests. I never heard of aplace where the vested interests wereso blatantly in control. They had nonotion whatever of public service, ofwhat being a public servant entails.You can't plan in a situation likethat. The pressures get to be un-bearable. "

The head of the Ada Council ofGovernments, Bob McAbee, resignedin July 1973, after two futile yearsof trying to keep the city from turn-ing into a mini-Los Angeles. Withinthe next two months, eight of the tenprofessionals on his staff followedhis example. Although a new citygovernment has since come to power,his successor, Alvin Marsden, is un-derstandably a cautious man.

So much for checking urbansprawl. Meanwhile, in another partof the forest-the central businessdistrict-other forces were energet-ically at work. They were tearing theplace down.

The Boise Redevelopment Agencywas formed as long ago as 1966.Like so many similar agencies

across the country, its goal is to ar-rest urban decay and stem the flight

, from the inner city. In its eight-yearpursuit of this commendable pur-pose, it has gone through three de-velopers-Urban Properties, Inc., ofPittsburgh, which decided it couldn'tafford the project; Boise Cascade,which overextended itself in otherfields and had to withdraw; and thecurrent designee, the Dayton-Hud-son Corporation of Minneapolis-but almost from the beginning, BRAand its appointed commissionershave been inflexibly wedded to asingle concept: a megastructure. Ascurrently envisaged, this would bea single vast building, housing underone roof an air-conditioned shop-ping mall, over 800,000 square feetof commercial space (includingthree department stores), 300,000square feet of office space, a hotelof over 250 rooms, and 2,444 park-ing spaces. An additional 1,800parking places are planned for satel-lite structures scattered around thesite. It would be, in effect, a super-suburban shopping center. The con-struction of this monolith entails thetotal clearance of eight blocks in theheart of the city and portions ofthree more-a good half of down-town. The only building to be re-tained is the Bank of Idaho, a 1964edifice of numbing mediocrity thatresembles nothing so much as astack of giant toaster ovens. The to-tal cost of the project ranges be-tween $70 million and $200 million,depending on whom you talk to.

THE MEN AND WOMEN OF BRA are.engaging and civic-minded peo-ple; they are without a doubt thenicest bunch of urban planners Ihave ever met. The agency's chair-man, Carroll Sellars, is a charmingmerchant of the old school, and theexecutive director, Gary Hughes, isan earnest and disarming youngman. They are neither villains norfools and, by their lights, they haveachieved much. For example, theyhave cleared almost all the landsouth of Main Street. Relocation ofthe businesses that existed there hasbeen carried out with a lack of cas-ualties that should make the man-agers of most clearance projects en-vious. (They have lost exactly three;the owners of two chose to re-tire, and the third, a Basque hotelowner in his eighties, was shot dead

TEARING DOWN BOISE

by one of his tenants in a non-clear-ance-related dispute.) The city treas-ury will lose no tax moneys if themegastructure is built, and privateindustry will bear nearly half thecost. Perhaps most important in acity afflicted by both an inferioritycomplex and an outspoken affectionfor such local wonders as ArrowrockDam (the tallest in the world be-tween 1915 and 1932), there is nodenying that the mega structure willbe the biggest thing of its kind formiles ant: miles.

At the same time, it is hard toshake the feeling that the people atBRA are affected with a species oftunnel vision. BRA has no fallbackposition, no alternative plan. As faras BRA is concerned, the mega-structure must be built, come hell orhigh water. Damn the objections,full speed ahead. The objections aremany.

"My God," says Bob McAbee,"when I got there and saw what theywere doing-the kind of total clear-ance that has been discredited onboth coasts for years-I simplycouldn't believe my eyes."

It is not just that total clearanceis currently unfashionable; totalclearance is out of favor in mostcities because it has never worked.Leveling a business district takestime, sometimes years, and it doesnot take a great deal of thought toperceive that turning it into a tem-porary prairie of parking lots onlyincreases the centrifugal forces thatcaused the area to decline in the firstplace. If the only thing you can dowhen you come downtown is parkyour car where the place used to be,most people are pretty much inclinedto say the hell with it. They go tothe suburban shopping centers in-stead-not just some of the time,but all of the time. Once the mega-structure is built-if it is built-there is absolutely no guarantee thatthese people will suddenly comestreaming back. Except for itssheer bulk, it does not differ sub-stantially from the suburban mallsthese people will have increasinglyaccustomed themselves to. It is noeasier to get to, and in many cases itis harder. Parking will cost money;in the suburban centers it is free.Nor can the managers of those cen-ters be expected to take competitionfrom the mega structure lying down.BRA proposes to overcome these dif-

40 ficulties by holding concerts in the

mall. It is a solution that strikesmore than one observer as the equiv-alent of whistling in the dark, exceptthat in Boise's case it more closelyresembles fiddling in a dirigiblehanger.

The buildings already torn downor in the path of further demolitionwere low and sturdy structures, putup before the advent of such modernmiracles as elevaters and air condi-tioning. They were adapted to theclimate of the high desert as best theycould be, with thick walls, tall ceil-ings, and windows that went up anddown. The megastructure, by con-trast, is elevatored, escalatored, andair-conditioned to a fare-thee-well;the enclosed central mall itself is acouple of stories high at least, whichis a lot of empty space to cool off orheat up, as the case may' be, espe-cially when you consider that it alsohas an immense glass roof. More-over, the entire concept is almosttotally dependent on the automobile,with all its integrated and satelliteparking spaces designed to accom-modate the sort of vehicles that, inNew York, are driven by blackpimps. The energy crisis hasn't yethit Boise with anything like an: in-structive impact. Gas is not onlyplentiful but a good deal cheaperthan it is in the East, even thoughthe nearest refinery is on the coast,400 miles away, and television pic-tures betray no tendency to shrinkalarmingly on hot days. There canbe little doubt that the energy pinchwill eventually creep up on Boise,however-no place in the world canescape it, not even rock-ribbed Re-publican territory-and the mega-structure's enormous need for powerwill do its bit to chivvy mattersalong. It is at least possible that in adecade or so Boiseans will wake upone morning to discover that their$70 million or $200 million (as Isaid, it depends on whom you talkto) has bought them the largest pot-ting shed in the Intermountain West.

There is also the possibility thatthe megastructure may never be builtat all. The actual building of it hingeson the three department stores thatwill form its commercial heart; ifthere are no department stores, therewill be no mega structure. As a recentletter in the local paper remarked,they might just as well plant sage-brush in the parking lots and givethe town back to the coyotes. Of thethree, the essential store is J.c. Pen-

ney. If Penney moves in, a dominoeffect is expected, with two othercompanies falling neatly into place.If Penney does not come in, how-ever, everyone will have to put histhinking cap on again. At the mo-ment, Penney betrays no inclinationto commit itself to anything. It al-ready has a perfectly good store indowntown Boise, and it also hassomewhere else to go, if it wants to.

The last fly in the ointment is aman named Harry Daum, and hewants J. C. Penney's, too. HarryDaum appears to have vowed th~tgrass will grow in the streets of Boisebefore his days are done. He is asmall, round, intimidating man (hedidn't seem to blink once in thecourse of a forty-five-minute inter-view) who came up from Californiain 1960 with the notion of buildingshopping centers. This he has pro·ceeded to do in the suburbs withconsiderable panache and unevensuccess. Now he proposes to build agrand shopping center close to thecity: the West Boise Mall or, as hisopponents would have it, Daumtown.Like the downtown megastructure,the new center would include over800,000 square feet of commercialspace. Its 600 acres would also sup-port light industry, office space, agolf course, and 1,200 units of hous-ing. Needless to say, Harry Daumwould like to have J.C. Penney's justas much as BRA would, for the samereasons. The Daumtown site standsspang in the population center ofAda County. It is adjacent to a rail-road line that could easily be convert-ed to mass transit if the county plan-ners ever come to their senses. HarryDaum has done his homework, and ifhe gets his way, not only is the mega-structure finished, but so is down-town Boise.

~/IEANWH]LE, A LOT OF the citizens1l'. of Boise have reached a pointwhere they don't want a bit of it. Nomegastructure. No Daumtown. Notany of it at all.

Boiseans are an amiable, even-tem-pered people. Slow to anger, rela-tively untouched by urban traumas,they have had little experience incommunity organization outside theirchurches. Not long ago, though, agreat many of them made the com-mon discovery that cars were parkedwhere their childhoods used to be,that their city was in serious danger

TEARI~G DOWN BpISEof. ceasing to exist, and that directlyin the path of the bulldozers lay vir-tually all. that remained of their ar-chitectural heritage. It made them'mad as hell. .

·BRA's Phase II area, north ofM.~in Street, is still standing andonly partially vacated. It is on thisground that the battle has beenjoined. On one of the threatenedblocks stands Iqaho's only Richard-sonian Romanesque office building.Nearby is the Eastman Buildingwith its cornice of lions' heads, al-most empty now, its shredded canvasawnings blowing in the wind liketattered flags; the handsome, mas-sively rusticated Union Block; and,perhaps most important of all, theAda Theater.

The Ada is one of the last Egyp-tian-style movie palaces in the UnitedStates. Built in 1927 by a local archi-tect named Fritz Hummel, it has atile roof, walls three feet thick, andinterior decoration that must be seento be believed. A pair of lovinglydetailed lotus columns support theproscenium arch, on which are paint-ed a gaggle of barechested but oddlynippleless dancing girls who appearto be either shaking their fists atsome musicians or desperately im-ploring them to stop. Above is agiant scarab that looks as if it weighsa ton. Flanking the stage itself-where once, incredibly, I sang "GhostRiders in the Sky" at Uncle Dan's(or was it Uncle Jim's?) kiddie mat-inee-are a pair of crosslegged Phar-aohs, curiously tricked out withmore of those nippleless breasts andholding bowls of red neon in theirlaps. I'm told there used to be amummy in the lobby, but that wasbefore my time.

The theater was opened to thepublic on a recent morning by agroup called Citizens for a BetterCapital which began its programwith a recital of longtime favoriteson the old pneumatic organ. In ad-dition to vox humanu and the rest ofthe usual stops, this wonderful ma-chine can also do sleigh bells andtambourines, and did. (There used tobe a stop for horses' hooves, too, butit was broken long ago.) Then wesaw a movie made about twentyyears ago for the Chamber of Com-merce. It told us what fine fellowsour local merchants are, and it ex-horted us to go to church every Sun-day. Every time an old landmark ap-peared on the screen the audience

cheered, and when .the lights wentup again, 700 people were present.A girl went up front and told us intones of the purest Virginian why itwas. essential te stop Harry Daumand save the rest of downtown fromBRA, a~d the director of the localart museum, who comes from Cali-fornia, told us why he hadn't likedit tI:ere and why he liked it here.Many o( the most ardent preserv~-tionists in Boise come from outsidethe state, and a good many of themlive in huge, handsomely restoredVictorian houses in the oldest partof town.

BRA's answer to these people isone that will strike a wearyingly fa-miliar note in the ears of preserva-tionists everywhere: nothing can bedone. Boise is in a class-two earth-quake zone, and the old buildingshave wooden foundations. They pro-vide none of the amenities of modernstructures. The cost of rehabilitationis prohibitive. "Let's face it," saysCarroll Sellars, "most of these oldbuildings are junkpiles. We're nottearing down a damn thing that'sworth anything. If the historic pres-ervationists had been around inolden times, the whole world wouldlook like the Parthenon."

Setting aside such an alarmingspectacle, it must be admitted thatSellars has a certain amount of righton his side. It would cost a bundle torehabilitate the old buildings, al-though a number of them appear tobe in absolutely splendid conditioneven now. In Boise, as in almosteverywhere else, the cause of historicpreservation is an uphill fight becauseit is subjective. It is impossible toput a price tag on the value of acity's culture, although it is child-ishly simple to put a price tag on thecost of obliterating it forever. "It's aquestion of context," says Arthur A.Hart, director of the state historicalmuseum. "A question of knowingwho we are and where we come from.A question of our human identity.The mega structure is inhuman. Notonly that, but it could be anywherein the world."

These are good words, and one hasheard them before, often while awrecker's ball was swinging some-where in the background. An old taleis being played out in Boise, and itprobably will not end well. Irrepar-able damage has already been done.If Boise succeeds in obliterating it-self for a shopping mall, there exists

a sinister likelihood that at least. some other small cities will followsuit, not because the mega structureworks, but because it was built at all.The lessons of N~w York City's pub-lie housing projects, of Los Angeles'scatastrophic ffeew.ay system did notprevent hundreds of other cities fromfollowing their path, with similar,inevitable, and easily predictable re-sults. If a technology exists, some-body wiU use it.

On my last day in Boise, I wentdown to the corner of Capital Boule-vard and Front Street, where China-town used to be. A little park oc-cupies the site now, on the edge ofthe vacant lots, with a couple of con-crete benches and a few shrubs inpots and no shade at all. It was ahot day without a breath of wind,not a cloud in the sky, and thedesert making itself felt just over thehorizon. I sat down on one of thebenches and tried to remember whathad been here, where the Hip SingAssociation had been, where theherbalist's had been, thinking aboutthe legends of tunnels under thestreets. I found myself wondering-okay, not without a certain amountof bathos, but what the hell, this wasmy history somebody had just wipedout-what I would tell my son ifI ever brought him here. I remem-bered that I'd once written about acharacter in a novel who had feltmuch the same way. The characterin my novel was sixty-five years old.

After a while I became aware ofsomething odd. People were flashingpast in their cars out there, no doubton their way to some distant shop-ping center or other. As they wentby, they stared at me. It was clearthat they'd never seen anybody sit-ting in the little park before. I wasinteresting; not as interesting asChinatown used to be, but interest-ing. They were wondering what waswrong with me, why I'd chosen to sitout there on that hard bench in thatworthless little scrap of park at teno'clock in the morning in ninety-de-gree weather, surrounded by roadsand cars. I had to admit that it waspretty damned peculiar, all right, andI immediately got up and walkedaway across the parking lots towardwhat was left of the town where Iwas born, thinking about the wordsof Harry Thaw on seeing a particu-larly atrocious new building. "MyGod," he said, "I shot the wrong

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