The period between 1950 and 1975 was an interesting time for the Central Addition, a time of aimlessness for a neighborhood that each day found itself more and more out of place within its own city. This neighborhood saw more change than one would expect during this time of economic cutbacks and expanding city limits, especially since its heyday had been expired for more than forty years. The Central Addition continued to be an important part of Boise’s heart, even though it had been on the receiving end of serious adversity, historical obscurity and detrimental public policy from a city that didn’t much value its history yet, but instead sought to demolish it in order to make way for future growth.
The Central Addition kicked off the year 1950 with most of its former self intact. The 1950 Boise Directory tells us many of its original homes were still well maintained and occupied by new families and there were still a few remaining homeowners that had purchased their home in the area’s better days. Many of the streets in the neighborhood looked the same; some of the streets, like Capitol Boulevard, had new commercial buildings brought by the increasing business sector of downtown Boise and some were lined with the typical turn of the century architecture. Restaurants, taverns, gas stations and vacuum cleaning shops lined Capitol Boulevard, the beginning of an invasion of businesses into a slowly dwindling neighborhood. Very few of the old businesses that crowded around the railroad still remained after the train line had been routed to the new Boise Depot; the Armco Drainage and Metal Production plant and the Boise Payette Lumber Company’s fuel department were still at their original locations on Third Street. Having been in place since the Oregon Short Line Railroad had been built, these were the oldest businesses in the area. There were also several businesses on Sixth Street at the time, the Ada Plumbing Company, Parks Auto Company and Eiden Warehouses, and a couple of Contracting businesses. As the parcel moved into 1953, we see change in the ownership of the properties, but no real growth or new efforts at developing the Central Addition.
In 1953 the Boise Directory showed very few changes to the Central Addition. The city and its homebuilders were much more concerned with expanding and building the newly annexed areas rather than the waning central neighborhoods. The largest amount of change during these three years took place on 6th Street, where the former location of Kloepfer and Gramkow construction contractors was no longer present at 416 South 6th Street. This building simply dropped from the rolls but another pops up nearby: Tennyson Transfer and Storage at 314 S. 6th Street. This moving company was built on a vacant lot between Broad and Front Streets, keeping the number of buildings in the Central Addition the same as it was in 1950. One building on 6th Street changed hands three times, from Ada Water Company in 1950, to Culligan Soft Water Service in ’53, then to J L Krauser Electrical Contractors in 1961. The lack of new development and complete stagnation of building new homes on the parcel was mostly thanks to the National Housing Act of 1934. This act, which made cheap mortgages available to all with a 20 year fixed term on 80% of the home’s cost, made it virtually impossible for anyone to build in the Central Addition. The neighborhood was already quite developed and consisted of older homes that weren’t worth renovating due to the law. When citizens can use their new cars to drive the short distance from their homes in the newly annexed sections of the city, the need for housing nearby to the city center was seemingly nonexistent. Coupled with the fact that those annexed sections were created from cheap and readily available county land that allowed you to build what you wanted, where you wanted it made it that much more appealing. It was a fool’s errand to build a home in Boise’s first neighborhood now. The century that brought us color television, McCarthy’s red scare, and de-segregation was about to pass the torch to the century that initiated the more rapid decline of the Central Addition as a residential neighborhood.
For Downtown Boise, life was ever changing during the 1960’s. New construction was a common theme. Many of the old architecture styles and stone buildings didn’t survive this phase of the City’s growth. There was little value for the historical nature of these structures, some of which had been there since Boise’s founding. For the people doing the demolition it was simply business as usual; taking down yesterday’s buildings that were too expensive to modernize so that they could build the modern ones in their place. The appeal of air conditioning, better electrical systems, and cheaper overall costs were too good to pass up and too expensive to cram into the smaller homes of old Boise. At the beginning of this century, the Central Addition had already seen the closures of the Seven-Up Bottling Company at 212 S. 5th Street, the Peasley Transportation Warehouse at 401 Capitol Boulevard, the Blue and White Service Station on Capitol Boulevard, and the Boise Payette Lumber Company fuel yard on 3rd Street. Most of the addresses went unclaimed, the buildings torn down and little replaced them because of the high cost of downtown property. Houses at 405 and 407 S. 3rd Street had been demolished, and the house at 416 S. 4th Street had been subdivided again to accommodate two more apartments. The only building built on the property since 1953 had been the recent addition of the Bestway Building Center at 220 S. 3rd Street, which seemed to add insult to injury as it sold building materials to the new development that now threatened this old residential area. Another year saw the demolition of two more homes in the neighborhood; Earl Adkins’ and Minerva Hall’s residences at 305 and 313 S. 4th Street had been cleared from the map as well.
Taking a look at the Directory from 1969 demonstrated the situation of the Central Addition all too well. From 1961 to 1969, Boise had continued to flourish, its boundaries extending deep into the Boise Bench and sporting a population that lived on the fringes of that city. Cars having made that the new reality of home ownership. Gone were the days that you could walk into downtown Boise, and the Central Addition was feeling the pain. One by one the grand old houses that had stood since the city’s earliest days were disappearing, but the most striking thing to notice were the businesses were under the same attack. Vacancy after vacancy was listed in the directory where thriving businesses used to be, no longer being able to keep their doors open after their customer base of nearby residents had been drying up year after year. Sometimes the buildings simply lay vacant, while others were cleared away with the possibilities for new development being whispered about by Boise’s city planners. They spoke of apartments and affordable housing that would re-energize the area, but none of these plans were ever realized. The Central Addition continued its pattern of continued loss into 1972, with a record number of cleared buildings. For the five addresses that disappeared on Capitol Boulevard between 1970 and 1972, only one building was built: the Boise Rescue Mission. Three more homes disappeared on 3rd Street, The Easter Seal Society for Crippled Children closed its doors on 5th Street as did Oppel Inc. Farm Machinery. 5th street also saw the destruction of addresses 406 and 422, older homes that had laid vacant for some time. Finally, The Hessing Thurber Motors Warehouse was closed and demolished after nearly twenty years of operation. Not only were the residences of the Central Addition under fire from the rampant growth but the businesses of the area were dying as well.
The Central Addition had reached the year 1975 without an identity. It was no longer a solid residential area with its randomly situated businesses and often vacant buildings; it was simply another conglomerate of buildings in the Boise downtown area. Few people except for the residents of the old homes could identify the history of the area, and much of it had been demolished or covered up. The houses were no longer as grand as they used to be, though photo evidence shows the ones that remained to be in well-kept condition. It wasn’t that every building in the Central Addition was decrepit and falling apart, it was that they were no longer cohesive enough to be called a neighborhood. The Development of Boise City had brought the destruction of some of its richest history, and the worst part was that no one knew it was there to miss.
Rome, Adam W. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge. Cambridge U.P. 2001. Print.
Polk’s Boise City Directory – 1950. n.d. Omaha, Nebraska, USA. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers.
Polk’s Boise City Directory – 1953. n.d. Omaha, Nebraska, USA. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers.
Polk’s Boise City Directory – 1960. n. d. Kansas City, Missouri, USA. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers.
Polk’s Boise City Directory – 1961. n. d. Kansas City, Missouri, USA. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers.
Polk’s Boise City Directory – 1969-1970. n. d. Kansas City, Missouri, USA. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers.
Polk’s Boise City Directory – 1972. n. d. Kansas City, Missouri, USA. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers.
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