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For almost two decades, Idaho's territorial government was housed in various private buildings around downtown Boise. After failed efforts to get the federal government to fund a capitol building, the territorial legislature finally agreed in 1885 to appropriate $80,000 for its construction.&nbsp; The red-brick structure, located on the block between Jefferson and State and Sixth and Seventh streets, served not only the last four years of territorial government (1886-1890) but the first twenty-two years of statehood. In 1905, as the state's population mushroomed with the advent of federally funded irrigation projects, a Capitol Building Commission was authorized. In addition to receiving detailed instructions from the Legislature on where and how to build the new Capitol building, the commission was expected also to build a new, separate structure to provide heat and electricity. Nothing was said about indoor plumbing, though the territorial capitol&nbsp;building was served by an outhouse. All was to be paid for from the sale of public lands designated for this purpose in the statehood admission act, plus the $66,003.35 then in the Public Building Endowment Fund, for a total of $350,000. Despite the provisions of the 1905 law, the final cost was $2,098,455.05 for the structure and $130,833.10 for interior furnishings.

The Idaho Capitol Building was constructed in two stages; the central part in 1912 and the two wings in 1920.  It is an excellent example of Renaissance Revival architecture.

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https://capitolcommission.idaho.gov/pdf/about/idaho_capitol_history_brochure.pdf

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The Idaho State Capitol is a great example of Renaissance Revival architecture. It was built in two stages, in 1912 and 1920. From the first floor to the eagle atop the dome, the building rises 208 feet and the floor area of the building when completed was 201,720 square feet. There is over 50,000 square feet of artistically carved marble in the building. The eagle atop the dome stands at 5 feet 7 inches tall and is made of copper with bronze plating. In 1905, the Idaho legislature passed the bill authorizing the building's construction. The first stage took several years to complete but the second stage, during which the wings (House/Senate chambers) were constructed, took only one year. The original cost to construct the Capitol was $2.1 million. Replacement costs today would be over $100 million, with many materials considered irreplaceable.



Idaho State Capitol

Visit some of the buildings added to downtown Boise during a building boom near the turn of the twentieth century. Start at the Idanha Hotel and walk to historic stores, a theater, a bank, a place where Civil War veterans gathered, a Post Office, and the Idaho State Capitol. The north end of the walk takes you to the former Carnegie Library building.

The Idanha Hotel Company purchased the lots to build a hotel in 1899. The location was chosen because it was only two blocks north of the train station at Front and Tenth Streets built in 1894. When the French chateaux style Idanha Hotel was completed in January 1901, the five-story structure was the tallest building in Idaho and held the state's first elevator. The turrets on three corners with deep conical roofs plus the jagged parapet edge of the building's mansard roofline are distinctive marks of this style. The red brick building rests on a sandstone foundation with a concrete footing and concrete piers at stress points. The rock came from Krall's quarry in Boise; the stonework was done by a Chicago company, Young, Cavanagh, and Sullivan. The building's red brick was made in Salt Lake City; the brickwork was completed by Louis Kieldson of Boise. The lintels and exterior trim are of stone. The turrets were constructed as wood frame with steel supports. Two iron balconies originally topped the two main entrances but were replaced with lower steel marquees by the 1970s. the cornice was galvanized iron with brick arranged in a dentil design. There are small dormer windows with hipped roofs above the cornice in the mansard roof.The footprint of the original building is 55 feet along Main St. by 122 feet. Twenty-two feet of the adjacent building along Main St. - part of the Somma Block - was acquired in December 1902 to become an annex for the hotel. The annex held a shop in the storefront with a bar behind the shop, which for many years was a coffee shop; the second and third floors were converted into additional hotel rooms. In its early years, the hotel was the scene of many banquets and events in its ground floor restaurant in the building's northwest corner. The Idanha hosted at least two presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The manager of the Idanha Hotel in 1914 was Ray F. Van Slyke; he took over for Charles Grout. Nightly room rates were $1.00 to $1.50 for rooms without a bath and $1.50 to $2.50 with a bath. The hotel billed itself as "Bosie's most popular hotel" and contained 140 rooms. The lobby was in the building's southwest corner, with offices to the east. The basement held a billiard room, boiler room, and work room; it connects to the basement of the annex. The second floor contained a meeting hall and dining room on its west side but had been converted into more hotel rooms by the 1970s.The Idanha Hotel Company sold the property to Broadbent Estate, Inc. in 1953 but Broadbent was still paying off the hotel company's stockholders in the mid-1970s. The building contained the Idanha Hotel, a coffee shop, a barber shop, a tailor shop, a jewelry shop, and a watch repair shop in 1974. The building was rehabbed in 1999 to create affordable apartments from the hotel rooms. Parklane Management Company now runs the Idanha Hotel Apartments.

This six-story building features with distinctive turreted corner towers was home to the Idanha Hotel from its opening in 1901 until the late 20th century. The French chateau style building was designed by Walter S. Campbell with the goal of being the small but growing city's leading hotel and "welcome mat" according to Dan Everhart of the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office. The downtown area was connected to the nation's rail network for the first time when a short line station was completed two blocks from this location. For the first five decades of the 20th century, the Idanha was at the center of political and social activity. This building took about a year to complete and its style was more typically used in eastern Canada and the northeastern U.S. The Idanha Hotel was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. As of 2023, the ground floor is home to Guru Donuts; an Indian restaurant called Bombay Grill; a cooking school; and Mullet Proof, a hair salon. In the basement is 10th Street Station, a bar. Since the 1999, the upper floors have been converted from 140 hotel rooms into fifty-two apartment units, the Idanha Hotel Apartments.

Idanha Hotel

Moses Alexander was born in 1853 in Bavaria. He emigrated to the U.S. and founded his men's clothing business in Boise in July 1891. The first Alexander's was in downtown Boise at Main and Fifth Streets. He originally settled in Missouri and became a partner in his cousin's clothing store in the 1870s. Moses planned to move to Alaska but was impressed by his stop in Boise and decided to stay. The business is thought to be the eleventh-oldest clothing business in America; most of the older enterprises are on the east coast. From 1897 to 1899 and again from 1901 to 1903, Moses was the mayor of Boise City. Moses became Idaho's eleventh governor and was the second Jewish governor in America. He served from January 1915 to January 1919. Alexander's had grown to eight stores in Idaho and Oregon by 1919. The shops came to be known for high-quality men's and boy's wear and expert tailoring services.The local architectural firm of Tourtellotte and Hummel designed the new Alexander Building for Moses. Construction began in 1924 and was finished in 1925. The location served as the company's main shop, warehouses, and offices for decades. The Main St. (front) of the two-story plus basement structure is three bays wide; the N. Ninth St. side is seven bays in width. The building's footprint is 50 by 122 feet. Doric piers separated the front bays. A denticulated cornice with a parapet wall, accented at the corner, tops the facades. "ALEXANDER" is inscribed on the center of the frieze on both street sides, accented with raised shields with a letter "A." Moses passed away in 1932 but the business continued under other family members.The Main St. side of the building was modified in 1955; its deep indentation and display island were changed to a more minimal indented corner. The glass marquee was modernized, and block lettering reading "ALEXANDERS" was added to the mezzanine windows. The Alexander Building was purchased by the Boise Redevelopment Company in 1976. The building was vacant in 1980, in preparation for renovation of the structure for retail and office space. The first and second floors were then open space with storage rooms along the north wall. Original cabinets survived along the east wall in the basement.A great-grandson of Moses, William F. Simon was president of M. Alexander, Inc. by 1980; the company was still based in Boise. There were a dozen Alexander's stores in Idaho and Oregon by then. The company was sold by the Alexander family to a long-time employee, David Graves, in 2006; the store name was Alexander Davis by then. Graves decided to retire after over forty years with the company; the shop, located in downtown Boise in the Hoff Building at Bannock near Eighth St., was closed on April 30th, 2022, after 131 years in business.

Constructed in 1925, this two-story building replaced a previous structure in this same spot that also held the flagship store of Alexander's, a men's clothing shop. The owner, Moses Alexander, also served two terms as mayor of Boise and two terms as the state's governor. The Alexander Building is the only surviving commercial building in Boise that is faced with white terra cotta. The Second Renaissance Revival style structure was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1980 and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. D.L. Evans Bank now occupies much of the building.

Alexander Building

<h4>History of the Ada Theatre</h4>
Before the construction of the Ada Theatre in 1927, Boise had a variety of fairly rowdy bars. Leo Falk, who owned a department store in downtown Boise, sought to reverse this bad publicity and build a picture theatre that would appeal to families. To build the theatre, Falk hired famed local architect Frederick C. Hummel, of the firm Tourtellotte and Hummel, to design the theatre.&nbsp;At first, Falk was adamant about building a Spanish-style theatre, while Hummel preferred Egyptian. In the end, Hummel won, and with a $100,000 bond issue financed by the investment house Childs and Co., and Jordan and Sons acting as the builders, the Ada theatre was built in 1927 to much acclaim.
On opening night, April 19, 1927, scores of people lined up to see the John Barrymore in the film, “Don Juan” (the first film to use the Vitaphone sound-on-disc sound system). Over the years, the Ada Theatre has been a staple among the Boise movie-lover scene. The Theatre hosted the world premiere of “Jeremiah Johnson” on December 2, 1972, with Robert Redford in the audience; Ada Theatre was also the chosen location for the world premieres of “The Bourne Identity,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.”1
<h4>Architecture of the Ada Theatre</h4>
The architectural beauty of the Ada Theatre endures as one of its most captivating elements. Among the prairie-style buildings dominating downtown Boise, the Egyptian-revival style of the Ada Theatre makes it a local landmark. Furthermore, with the widespread fascination with Egyptology at the time of its construction, the Ada Theatre's overall architecture features full usage of Egyptian symbols, including sphinxes, scarabs, sacred vultures, and so forth. Even the two-story, rectangular structure of the building, which features reinforced concrete walls, provides the theatre with the appearance that it was made out of large blocks of rock, such as those used on the pyramids.
Inside the lobby, the vaulted room was once richly painted to give off a mosaic effect of gold and precious stones. Surrounding the lobby were concrete walls showing symbols and images from the Book of the Dead as well as hieroglyphics from the papyrus of Ani. Since its construction, the Ada Theatre has undergone several renovations, though many of the Egyptian-themed images on the interior walls can still be found. In 1999, however, the Theatre was remodeled to better resemble its original design.2

The Ada Theatre in downtown Boise, also known as the Egyptian Theatre, was once considered to be one of the most beautiful cinema houses in the United States. Built in 1927 as a stunning example of Egyptian-revival architecture, the Ada Theatre remains virtually unchanged, and it is the only Egyptian-revival building in the entire state of Idaho. Its design followed the national fascination toward Egyptology at the time, and it was built following the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. 

Nowadays, visitors to the Ada Theatre can discover a variety of shows, ranging from movie screenings to stand-up comedy to literature readings. Even among the Hollywood elite, the Theatre remains an icon for movie releases and other events. Due to its historic significance, especially that of the grand cinema and movie palace era in Boise, the Ada Theatre was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Egyptian (Ada) Theatre

Boise architect John E. Tourtellotte designed the Union Block in 1899 in the Richardson Romanesque style. Constructed of brick and stone from Tablerock quarries, the commercial structure of two stories plus a basement was finished by contractor J.W. Smith in 1902. The building is 125 feet wide with five large arches across the front filled with some of the second-story windows. The front facades are stepped in height, with the central section having the most elaborate and tallest parapet wall reading "UNION BLOCK" above a band of clerestory windows. Union Block cost $35,000 to build and was financed by a syndicate of Boise's movers and shakers, including then-Mayor, Moses Alexander and John Green, the Commandant General of Fort Boise.The interior was divided into five narrow spaces on the first floor; each section or pair of sections had its own owner and address. In 1903, the tenants in the five commercial storefronts were plumbers, two grocery stores, a second-hand store, and a printing company. The hall above the two eastern spaces contained a stage but no scenery. The 1912 Sanborn map revealed that one space was a sausage factory with electric-powered machines while another sold paints, oils, and wallpapers; the other three were stores. The Capitol News and Printing Company was one of the early tenants; others were the Boise Mercantile, the OK Grocery Store, and A.M. Beal's furniture shop. The first-floor spaces have also held a drug store and a variety of restaurants. The east end of the second-floor space has been the site of a roller-skating rink, a dance studio, and most recently a ballroom/ events venue named the Rose Room. There are office spaces on the rest of the second floor which have been occupied by attorneys, real estate agents, and architects. Pyramid-shaped skylights top the central hallway with office spaces to either side. Original doors and woodwork survived on much of the second floor in 1980 when the building was studied for the Historic American Buildings Survey.In the 1960s, the building was slated to be demolished but was saved. The Boise Redevelopment Company acquired each of the five sections in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Union Block was renovated in the early 1990s by Ken Howell after being nearly vacant for fifteen years. A false front made of perforated aluminum panels that had been added in 1963 to the two eastern sections (covering the arched facades) was removed, exposing the original stonework. The first-floor facades have been modernized except for the stone arched doorway near the center that leads to the upper level.

Constructed of brick and faced in stone from Tablerock quarries, this commercial structure features five stone arches on the second story and was completed in 1902. The building's construction occurred during a period of rapid growth for Boise, and in the decades that followed, this structure has held a number of businesses in its five sections, including a sausage factory, a dance studio, and a roller-skating rink. The Union Block was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1980 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 for its distinctive architecture, along with the adjacent stone building at the corner, the Montandon (or Fidelity) Building (1908). Moon's Kitchen and Cafe is one of the tenants on the ground floor (712); another is a home decor retailer, Balsam Brands (718),

Union Block

Boise City National Bank was founded in 1886 by several Boise businessmen plus outside investors. The bank was originally located at the same intersection as the present building (8th and Idaho Streets), but on the opposite corner. Bank president in 1891 was Hosea Eastman. The original design for the new Boise City National Bank building by Boise architect James King called for a three-story structure of brick on a sandstone base. The sandstone from the existing bank building was recycled into the two-foot-thick walls of the first floor of the new building; that sandstone originated in the local Tablerock Quarry. The Romanesque Revival design was meant to instill confidence that depositors' money would be safe. The design of this bank building is said to have been based on the 1887 Marshall Field Store building in Chicago, by H.H. Richardson. The new bank held two vaults; the first, made of marble, was in the basement to hold money in a large safe behind an 18-inch-thick door. The other vault was for holding documents. King also designed the Moore-Cunningham mansion in Boise (also a Clio entry).A fourth floor was added to the bank building in 1906, topped by a jagged roofline, resembling a castle or fort. The floors above the first were designed to hold office space. There were six banks in Boise by 1912, with over $6 million in deposits. The 1891 building was in need of renovations by 1913, and the local firm Tourtellotte and Hummel designed a new corner entrance with granite pillars. The building was expanded westward with four new bays along Idaho St. The exterior brick walls of floors two to four were covered in matching sandstone.Boise City National Bank did not survive the Great Depression. One morning in 1932, the bank failed to open. The building was soon occupied by another bank, First Security Bank. Other tenants have included the Idaho Power Company, the Boise Water Corporation, and Balloon and Latimer Company. A multi-millionaire named Jack Simplot bought the building in 1948 to become the headquarters of his industrial and business enterprises.In the 1980s, the building was renovated. The building underwent an award-winning renovation again in 2010 by the Rocky Mountain Companies LLC. Besides its original name as the "801 Building," the structure has been called the Boise City National Bank, the 805 Idaho Building (after the address changed from 801 around the 1950s), or the Simplot Building. A post-1970s decorative lighted sign reading "805 Idaho" is attached to the first floor on the Idaho St. side near the corner with 8th St. A bronze plaque marking the historic building is affixed near one of the arched double-door entryways along Idaho St. The marble vault is now located below a ground-level restaurant named Fork; bank tellers would have been in the space occupied by the restaurant.

This four-story stone-faced building was constructed in 1891 and was home to Boise City National Bank until the Great Depression when it joined many other financial institutions in closing its doors. The main entrance on N. 8th St., below a curved archway, features a stone tablet inscribed "BOISE CITY NATIONAL BANK." Since the bank's closure in 1932, several banks and a variety of other tenants have occupied the historic structure. The building was studied for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1974 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Fork Restaurant currently occupies the ground floor along N. 8th St. of what has become the "805 Idaho" building; Alavita, an Italian restaurant, is in an Idaho St. space.

Boise City National Bank Building 

The architect of the Idaho Building was Henry John Schlacks, based in Chicago. This was one of several buildings designed for real estate developer Walter E. Pierce. From 1895 to 1897. Pierce served as Mayor of Boise for one term and instituted the city's first street paving project. Pierce was born in Texas in 1860 and worked as a hotel proprietor in Missouri in the 1880s. He moved to Boise soon after Idaho became a state in 1890. Pierce partnered with Lindley H. Cox and John M. Haines to form W. E. Pierce and Company, a real estate and title abstract firm. The firm was originally located at 820 Main St. but moved into the new Idaho Building.The six-story plus basement building is second Renaissance Revival style. It is U-shaped in plan and measures about 103 by 122 feet. The first floor is stone with Doric pilasters. The upper floors are faced in red brick with banded brick pilasters marking the seven bays on each side and terra cotta panels above and below the windows. At the top of the fifth story is a band with egg and dart molding. The sixth floor is the fanciest, with pilasters of contrasting bands of brick and terra cotta with terra cotta brackets below a denticulated cornice. The brick visible on the two non-street sides is buff/ tan.In 1912, the first floor featured two elevators beyond the central entrance lobby (on the west side), with office spaces to the north and south. There were six retail spaces on the first floor, with the one closest to the street corner containing a drugstore. The upper floors were designed with a hallway down the center of each wing with offices on both sides of the hallway. A number of attorneys and architects had offices in the building in the 1910s. Other early tenants were Boise Title &amp; Trust Company, with Pierce as a business partner, and Darice Beauty Parlor.W. E. Pierce and Company sold the Idaho Building to Lindley H. Cox, the company's vice president, in 1923. Cox headed L.H. Cox and Company, a local real estate and insurance firm. The Idaho Office Building Company purchased the Idaho Building from the Cox family in 1964. There were plans to raze buildings in a wide swath of downtown Boise, including the Idaho Building, to create an outdoor shopping mall; thankfully, the urban renewal project did not take place. Boise Redevelopment Agency became the new owners in 1973.Alexander's, a men's clothing store, occupied the corner ground-floor space when the building was photographed for the National Register. When the building was studied by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1980, the original doors were still present on the office floors, plus original mosaic tiles in the hallways. The upper floors were partially converted into housing after renovations in 2000 and were leased to become a hostel in the early 2010s. They are now Idaho Building Apartments and feature the original hardwood (maple) flooring in the 49 studio, one-, and two-bedroom units.

Completed in 1911, this five-story red brick building with terra cotta trim is the Idaho Building. The building's opening was celebrated in local newspapers who proclaimed this structure to be Boise's first skyscraper. Designed for one of Boise's leading real estate developers and former mayor, Walter E. Pierce, the building was owned by the family of L.H. Cox, a partner of Pierce, until the 1960s. As of 2023, the ground floor of the historic building houses Cupbop Korean Barbecue (278 N. 8th), Wild Root Cafe (276 N. 8th), Prost! German pub (274 N. 8th), and Tonic Hair and Skin Bar (707 Bannock). The upper floors now contain Idaho Building Apartments. The building was documented in 1980 by the Historic American Buildings Survey and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Idaho Building

Boise became the state capital in 1864 – a year after John O’Farrell built the first building in
the valley – and in 1901 construction began on a sandstone federal
building on 312 North 8th Street. A Boise architect, William S.
Campbell, was commissioned to design the building based on the work of&nbsp;the supervising architect of the U.S. Treasury Department, James L. Knox.&nbsp;The similarities between Knox’s U.S. Post Office in Niagara Falls, New York,
and Campbell’s building in Boise are striking. Construction finished in 1905,
and over the next half century the building centralized a number of federal
departments that had been distributed around Idaho. Beneficially located near
the state Capitol Building, it contained Boise’s post office and federal court,
and the FBI’s “Most Wanted” poster was hung in the lobby. 

Despite the building’s expansion in 1930, by the even 1960s
more space was needed for Idaho’s growing bureaucracy, and a new federal
building was constructed on Fort Street in 1968. The post office moved to South
13th Street shortly afterwards. However, the building has since resumed its role as post office, and&nbsp;continues to
be a popular destination for visitors to the city. It has even served as a film set, for the&nbsp;Idaho Public
Television’s movie, Assassination:
Idaho’s Trial of the Century.

Half of the four-story building was constructed
with local sandstone. This was cut from the bedrock using an electric saw for
the first time in the city. The rest of the structure is composed of white
brick. The granite steps leading to the main entrance contain the largest slab
of stone ever quarried in the region, weighing over 10,000 lb.&nbsp; The exterior is decorated with classically-inspired
marble pilasters, decorative wrought iron door frames, a cornice with
ornamental dentils, and a vaguely crenellated parapet. Inside one can admire the
oak panelled walls, the bronze adornments on the elevator, and the terrazzo
flooring.

Nestled in a district that contains some of the grandest buildings in the city, the Old Federal Building and US Post Office offers a glimpse into the optimism and pride of Boise's city boosters who constructed this building at the turn-of-the-century. The building also serves as an example of the Beaux Arts variation of the neoclassical architectural style. Preservationists have worked to restore the building, paying special attention to finishing details throughout the building such as the wrought iron gates and door frames, the terrazzo floor, and oak-paneled walls.

Old Federal Building and US Post Office

In 1871, one year after the 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote, Representative Joseph William Morgan proposed women’s suffrage for the first time in the Idaho territory. The proposal was defeated in a tie vote and similar proposals were defeated in 1885 and 1887. When Idaho requested statehood, they specifically excluded women’s suffrage from the new constitution, fearing that it would hinder the acceptance of statehood. When women’s suffrage was not included in the state constitution, the first suffrage organization formed in 1893. The Idaho Equal Suffrage Association organized in 1895 and a year later a constitutional amendment granted Idaho women full suffrage. Idaho ratified the 19th Amendment on February 11, 1920.

 Idaho Ratifies the 19th Amendment, February 11, 1920

The Grand Army of the Republic was an organization formed for Union Civil War veterans with three objectives: fraternity, charity, and loyalty. The idea for the group came from Benjamin Franklin Stephenson, an Army surgeon from the Fourteenth Illinois Infantry. The first post was chartered in April 1866 at Decatur, Illinois with twelve members. In a few months, dozens of other posts were formed in Illinois. The idea quickly spread to other states, and by the first national GAR convention in November 1866 in Indianapolis, members hailed from the District of Columbia and ten states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The veterans chose General Stephen A. Hurlbut of Illinois as their first commander-in-chief. The second national encampment was held in Philadelphia in 1868, where General John A. Logan of Illinois was elected to head the organization. One of the later commanders-in-chief was General Ambrose E. Burnside of Rhode Island, whose facial hair was the origin of the term "sideburns."The GAR became increasingly involved in politics, especially in lobbying the federal government for veterans' causes. At its peak in 1890, before many veterans succumbed to old age, The GAR contained 400,000 members in 7,000 posts. Five American presidents were GAR members: Union General Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley. There were still 5,000 posts when the GAR celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1916. The GAR officially disbanded in 1949; the last member died at age 109 in 1956.The GAR Hall in Boise was built for the Phil Sheridan chapter of the GAR, named for a Union Civil War general who helped turn the tide to win the Battle of Cedar Creek in Middletown, Virginia in October 1864. Construction began in October 1891 and was completed in January 1892. The official name for the new Boise building was the Phil Sheridan GAR post no. 4. It became one of thirty-four GAR buildings constructed in Idaho.GAR Hall originally measured 80 feet on the sides and 35 feet on the front and back. The front gable features band-sawn wood trim above a sandstone block with the lettering "G. A. R." carved into it. Carved keystones in segmental arches top the sash windows and single front door of the main facade. The first and second floors were each designed to hold a large hall. There are small anterooms in the ends of the building as well as front and back stairways. To give a slightly taller ceiling, the second-story hall's ceiling is coved to conform to the roof. The fairly simple building was the work of a contractor named William Houtz who formerly built mainly large timber structures for mining camps. Electricity and plumbing weren't added to the building until 1897 when the structure was five years old.Duane W. Garrett. who took many of the black and white official photos of Boise buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s, purchased GAR Hall in 1973. It had been one of the last GAR posts that was still in the hands of veterans' organizations. Garrett planned to preserve the exterior while adapting the interior for his commercial photographic studio. The open halls were divided into smaller office spaces, and a rear two-story addition was built that contained bathrooms and a kitchen.

Built in 1892 as a meeting place for a local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), an organization of Union veterans of the Civil War, GAR Hall is on W. State St., northwest of the Idaho State Capitol building. The two-story brick building has a front gable with a sandstone block set into the brick below with the incised lettering "G. A. R." The building was designed to hold two large meeting halls, with one on each floor. GAR Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 for its significance in architecture and social history. The building was adapted into a photographic studio in the 1970s and has been leased as administrative offices by the University of Idaho since the early 2000s. GAR Hall is owned by its neighbor, St. Michael's Cathedral.

GAR Hall

Library services in the city of Boise originated from a group of women in the Columbian Club, In 1895, the group began operating a subscription readers' service. The original books were kept in Boise City Hall in a free reading room. The growing city needed a more formal public library and began looking for funding near the turn of the twentieth century. Andrew Carnegie, the millionaire philanthropist who made his fortune in the steel industry, donated funds to hundreds of towns across America in the early twentieth century to be used toward constructing public libraries. Carnegie required the city to supply the land and funds for maintenance. Boise was gifted $20,000 after the state library commission, with the endorsement of Governor F. W. Hunt, applied to Carnegie in 1902 for a grant. The city contributed $4,000 toward the library building, and another $1,000 was donated by the Columbian Club. The land at Eighth and Washington Streets was donated by the school board.A competition was held for the design of Boise's Carnegie Library; seventeen entries were received. Tourtelotte and Company, one of the four architectural firms from Boise who entered, was chosen. Coming in second was a Spokane, Washington firm, C. Z. Hubbell, followed by Campbell and Wayland of Boise. The beige pressed brick to construct the Carnegie Library was manufactured in Boise. The sandstone used to build the foundation was quarried locally from Table Rock, just east of the city. Even the men who constructed the building hailed from Boise, working for Michels and Weber, who was awarded the contract in July 1904. The projecting central bay with a pedimented gable holds double entry doors; to either side are three tall, arch-shaped windows. Rusticated stone arches above the windows contain keystones. The cornice is simple, with dentils; the roof is hipped.The project took several months longer than expected but the building was finally done in May 1905. On May 1st, 1905, a celebration was held to mark the library's completion, with a grand ball and tours of the new building. The dedication ceremonies, originally scheduled for the following day, were postponed a day due to weather events. The main speaker at the dedication was Salt Lake City Judge C. C. Goodwin. The library first opened for service on June 22nd, 1905.The building served as the Boise Public Library until 1973, when the library relocated to another Boise spot. Since April 27th, 1973, the library has been situated in Boise's Salt Lake Hardware Building, constructed in 1946. The City of Boise purchased the building, at 715 South Capitol Boulevard, and renovated it to become the new library; Boise Public Library continues to be in this spot. The former library building on Washington St. then was converted into private offices. The building was owned by William A. Hon Investment Company when it was documented for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The Carnegie Library, Boise was listed in the National Register individually in 1974 and also as part of the Fort Street Historic District. The building is considered the best-preserved of the few Carnegie Libraries that survive in Idaho.Legal offices vacated the building in 2017 and the structure was still vacant as of late 2022. The owners are still considering options, possible tenants, and business partners, but once considered converting the building into spaces for art studios. Swanby Investment Group stated that the hope is for the building to return to some use related to public learning.

Completed in 1905, this large, beige brick building was designed by Boise architects Tourtellotte and Company as the city's first library thanks to local donations and a matching grant from Andrew Carnegie. The Boise Public Library opened in the French Renaissance style building in 1905, ten years after it began as a subscription service. The library moved to another building in April 1973 and the former library was converted into office spaces. Legal offices vacated the building in 2017 and the structure has been vacant since then. There are no definite plans, but one idea was to convert the building into spaces for art studios. The Carnegie Library, Boise was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and also is part of the Fort Street Historic District.

Downtown Boise Historical Walking Tour, from Idanha Hotel to Carnegie Public Library

Idaho State Capitol

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

Additional Information