Growing Boise has ‘lost a lot, gained a lot’

  It didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has lived in Boise very long that it was recently named the number-one city people are moving to from other parts of the country.

  Boise, according to a recent analysis titled “America’s Most Magnetic Metros Ranked by 2026 Migration Demand,” is the nation’s number-one magnetic metro. The reason citied is that it has the highest rate of people moving to Boise as opposed to  leaving.

  As if we didn’t already know that Boise is attracting newcomers. Last year, according to the U.S. Census, the Boise area’s growth was a major factor in Idaho’s ranking as the second fastest growing state in the country by percentage. Boise has been among the nation’s fastest growing cities for some time now.

  My father, who died in 1985 and lived in Boise much of his life, would’t recognize it today. The metro area’s  population then was roughly 145,000. Now it’s 488,000.

  When I was a teenager, it was approximately 93,000. The population of the city proper, as opposed to the metro area, was a little over 34,000.

  It was an idyllic place to grow up. From our neighborhood in the North End, it was a five-minute walk to school, church, two grocery stores (one with a really great bakery), a municipal swimming pool and a bicycle repair shop.

  We rode bikes everywhere. We rode them to the school grounds  to play baseball, which actually was the national pastime then. We rode them to the swimming pool. We rode them to Camels Back Hill to catch tadpoles in the ponds there. We caught them in Mason jars, pedaled home with them and put them in fish bowls. When they grew into frogs, we held frog races.

  Races in name only. Frogs have no concept of starting or finish lines and are annoying independent. They hop pretty much wherever they please and, often as not, don’t hop anywhere at all. Given their refusal to cooperate, frog races tended to be fleeing diversions.

  Not so with fishing at the Strawberry Glen Bridge. It was just west of what’s now the Glenwood Bridge, and a long bike ride from our neighborhood. There was a small airport there, long since replaced by houses. 

  With decades of development resulting in hugely increased traffic on State Street, few parents today would let their kids make that ride. It’s too dangerous. (Lending Tree recently rated Idaho as having the seventh worst drivers in the nation.) Our parents didn’t give it a second thought.

  And the fishing was great.

  Now the Strawberry Glen Bridge is a memory. So are the Strawberry Glen airport, both of the old neighborhood’s grocery stores and the bicycle repair shop. It’s probably been decades since a kid caught a tadpole at Camels Back Hill, now Camels Back Park.

  But while we’ve lost a lot, we’ve also gained a lot. Yes, we have long lines and gridlock that once were unknown, but Boise also is a more interesting place with far more things to do.

  We didn’t have the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts in my younger days. A small sampling of the notable acts and individuals that have appeared there includes Broadway and touring productions such as Cats, Hamilton, Wicked, the Lion King, Les Miserable and more; B.B. King; Tony Bennett, Itzhak Perlman, Hal Holbrook, Robert Redford …

  I vividly recall going to Bronco football games with my sister, who was ten years older and a student at what was then Boise Junior College. The games were played on a grass field with wooden bleachers that might have held 100 people and were mostly empty. Most of the fans who bothered to attend stood on the sidelines. The players’ uniforms were streaked with mud and grass stains.

  Now the Broncos play in a stadium with a capacity of 36,000 on a blue field that is nationally famous. They’ve defeated powerhouses like Georgia, Florida State, TCU, Virginia Tech, Oregon and, in one of the most famous games in college football history, the mighty Oklahoma Sooners.

  Shopping in Boise, aside from grocery stores, used to be limited mainly to a few stores downtown.The city struggled mightily and unsuccessfully for years to build a shopping mall downtown, fearing that a suburban mall would be downtowns’ death knell. The suburban mall opened in 1988, and today downtown is alive, well, vibrant.

  A partial sampling of attractions that didn’t exist in the good old days includes the Velma V. Morrison Center, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, the Basque Block and Basque Museum and Cultural Center, the Idaho Black History Museum, the Irma Hayman and James Castle houses, Freak Alley, the Old Idaho Penitentiary and Outlaw Field, Art in the Park …

  And still we continue to grow. The number one place to move.

  To newcomers, welcome. To those who are thinking of becoming newcomers, please think about some other places as well. Boise is still a pretty good place to live, but it’s not the idyllic little town you may think it is. We’ve grown so much, so fast. That place doesn’t exist any more.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.