Exploring BOISE
BOISE – Compared with this capital city of about 200,000 residents, with a metropolitan area population that tops a half-million, every other town in Idaho is small potatoes.
Any way you slice it, living here has its advantages. According to the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau, the city’s unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, the average wage is $42,432 per capita and the average price for a house in Ada County is $172,000.
Sunshine prevails and there are distinct seasons, making Boise’s fabulous assortment of large, lovely parks and 25-mile riverside bicycle/pedestrian path a draw year-round. Ski areas are as close as 16 miles away, Boise State University has academics and athletics worth sampling and the downtown area is clean, walkable and friendly.
Tourists easily could spend a few days here sampling the many museums, cultural attractions, shops and restaurants, or use the city as a base for day trips into the Rocky Mountains.
When I stopped in mid-June, I got oriented with the Boise Tour Train, spent a couple hours at the Old Idaho Penitentiary State Historic Site and topped off the day with a swing through downtown’s weekly “Alive at Five” celebration.
The train, whose small red cars ride on rubber wheels and are pulled by a locomotive-like truck on city streets, was a bit disappointing only because my particular tour was given by a trainee. His narration and driving were equally jerky, with a few puns thrown in to make things better or worse, depending on whether you’re amused by such things.
For example, when we passed the city’s old cemetery, our driver-guide said, “Little did planners know that it would end up in the dead center of town.” Or: “Believe it or not, this house to our right has five kitchens – Mr. Kitchen, Mrs. Kitchen and their three lovely children.”
Aside from those verbal distractions, the 90-minute tour was an entertaining and comprehensive look at central Boise. We started in Julia Davis Park, home to several museums and the zoo. It was there that we learned the “City of Trees” has only two trees that are indigenous: the cottonwood and willow.
Once out of the park, we headed down Warm Springs Avenue and saw some of the town’s largest and most stately homes. After turning around at the penitentiary road, we retraced our rickety-rackety route before veering by the Capitol building, modeled after the U.S. Capitol in Washington. We also passed the former Idaho Statesman newspaper building, from whose second-floor balcony the day’s news used to be yelled to passersby.
Confined by a tight schedule, I hustled to my car and drove back out to the penitentiary. As prison tourist attractions go, this one’s a gem, kind of like Alcatraz but with looming hillsides substituting for the San Francisco Bay as background scenery.
About 13,000 men and women were incarcerated at the site between 1872 and 1973, when a riot that destroyed much of the already deteriorating complex prompted its closing. Within the 17-foot-high, 2.5-foot-thick sandstone perimeter walls are a dozen buildings and scattered remains.
An example of the latter are the roofless ruins of the 1898 dining hall, designed by inmate George Hamilton (a deeply tanned gentleman, perhaps) who committed suicide the day after he was released. He couldn’t stomach freedom, apparently.
Many of the buildings contain cells, of course, some “decorated” in the style they would have been with occupants. The maximum-security “5 House 1954” contains an exhibit about the 10 men who were executed at the prison, with murderer Raymond Snowden’s 1957 hanging being the most recent – and the only one conducted in the building’s second-floor gallows, which vaguely can be seen behind darkened glass.
Downstairs, shanks, saps, clubs and other prisoner weapons are displayed. There, I learned that such devices mostly were hidden in common rooms, not cells. “You’re crazy if you keep your weapons in your own house,” an ex-convict is quoted as telling a reporter.
Although a two-sided map and data sheet that are included with the admission price gives visitors the basics, a walking-tour booklet is a good investment at $2.50.
In it, I was taken aback to read how prisoners in solitary confinement got their nicotine fix. Fellow inmates would place cigarettes in waterproof bags and flush them down the toilet, from where the bags would travel through open pipes that passed under the bathroom holes in solitary-confinement cells, whose occupants would go “fish.” When you gotta smoke, you gotta smoke, I guess.
Back downtown, “Alive at Five” enlivens a blocked-off Grove Plaza on Eighth Street, north of Julia Davis Park and the Boise River by a few blocks, from 5 to 8 p.m. every Wednesday through September. Live bands, vendor booths including beer sellers, lots of seating and a borderless fountain that kids like to run through on warm evenings are among the attractions.
After a quick look at that lively scene, I slipped over to the companionably calm TableRock BrewPub & Grill, at Fulton Street and Capitol Boulevard, for a reddish pint of satisfying local beer – courtesy of a coupon included with my Boise Tour Train fee.
Somehow, even though I was in Idaho, I resisted ordering a side of french fries.