Category: To Occupy my Time

In the earlier post, I walked around downtown and took a bunch of pictures.  Ironically, I actually did not spend a ton of time downtown for my neighborhood was far away (though on this visit I found everything much closer together than I remembered) from the very exotic downtown area.  Here’s where I mostly hung out.

That empty lot is where I went to junior high school.  Before it was an empty lot, it was West Junior High School, home of the Mustangs.  There is still West Junior High today, but they’ve built a new school somewhere else. (note to West’s website person. I could not find the address for the school prominently displayed or at all. You should fix that)  I had really great teachers at West, and I did not appreciate them at all until I got to high school, where I had a bunch of so-so teachers.
 

This nursing home, catty-corner across the street from West, is where my grandmother lived the last few years of her life.
 

This hill, behind Hillcrest Plaza is the marker of the “second bench” which is where I lived.  When biking in Boise, it’s flat, except for the first bench and the second bench.  I worked, for a time, for a liquor store on the other side of town.  Many days I rode my bike and got to go up these hills on the way home.  It doesn’t look that steep in this picture, but look how long the approach is. Before I had a bike with gears, this was a hill to walk my bike to the top.
 

Here’s Hillcrest Plaza.  It has been totally renovated since I left town.  The Plaza Twin movie theater used to be here.  It was the first dollar movie theater I encountered and I frequented it often.  This theater was the site of the mid-week double feature of For the Boys and The Fisher King.  We were out until 11 on a school night! We were so wild.  Also.  The lot at the top of the hill has been available for decades.
 

The across-the-street neighbor’s house.
 

My birth-to-eighth grade house.
 

Another view.  That lilac bush was there when I lived there.
 

Mr & Mrs. Heimbauch’s house.  Mr. Heimbauch died while I was in junior high school, but Mrs Heimbauch lived there for a very long. They were our very old neighbors.  It seems she wasn’t too terribly old when I was little, because I’m 38 and she just recently died at age 100.
 

Around the corner (five houses down from the first one) is my second house, the one I call my high school house.
 

Another view.  I’m glad to see it’s still that butter yellow color.
 

I have no memories of this house, I was just intrigued by the pie plates.  Whatever could be up with them?  There’s a short story to be written here.
 

Around the corner from the high school house is my friend Cindy’s House.  I was delighted to see the Jalapeno Wagon was sitting out front.  That was a very fun car with a lot of modifications, including very cool cup holders.  It even had (and probably still has) a CB radio.  One night we drove up and down I-84 chatting with truckers.  Lori was the best at chatting.  Her handle was “Cotton Candy.”  She convinced one trucker to pull off at the Flying J truck stop and have some food with “five beautiful women.”  The fifty-year-old trucker laughed when he saw our giggly 17-year-old selves and so did we.  He was a nice man and we had a good conversation.

Cindy’s mom was in the yard and I stopped to chat, thus ending this nostalgia drive.

There are few pictures of people on this vacation, but man did I take a lot of pictures of buildings.  Settle in, because this is a long post.  Or, I guess, get ready to skim and scroll.  Here we go!

This was the Crazy Horse back in my day. The linked article mentions a whole bunch of really cool bands who played there.  I never saw any of them.  But I did see shows that my friends played in.  And I did spend a lot of time at those shows in the mosh pit.  And that was amazing.
 

I love that this motel looks exactly the same as it did the entire time I was growing.  Same sign, same mural, same everything.
 

This is the empty lot where we used to look out for the weird, old guy.  He would jog in circles around this and the next block, decked out in short runner shorts and a tank top (both odd for the time) and his long gray hair would bounce behind him.  He would do this endlessly in the heat of summer. Later, he robbed a bank.  In retrospect, I suspect he had some mental problems.
 

One of my favorite places to go as a child.  Here, I got the riding boots I wore to the one sleep-away camp I went to growing up.  But I loved to just wander through the store.  It was huge, and full of treasures.
 

Where I bought my first “cool” bike.  It was a green Trek mountain bike and replaced the blue road bike my parents gave me when I was 10. The summers I was home after college, I rode it all over the city.
 

My dad always loved Hannifin’s Cigar Shop because they carried out-of-town newspapers.  I went there as a teenager, because it was the one place I could find Dirt, the quarterly for teenage males that my favorite magazine, Sassy, published.
 

 

One of these two storefronts (I think maybe the one on the left) had a 24-hour coffee shop where boyfriend #4 and assorted friends would hang out into the wee hours of the morning.  I can’t remember what it was called, but I do recall that boyfriend #4 met the next girlfriend there, and spent a lot of time there hanging out with her, so I have mixed feelings about the place.
 

The Idanha!  I always wanted to stay there and never did. One of my friends did, though, and had one of those life-changing moments there.  Now it has become apartments.
 

Parking garages!  We used to wander around downtown, wander to the top of the garages and take in the view.  It was before a lot of the taller buildings had been built.
 

This shop on the Grove had coffee and magazines and I always felt very smart spending time here.
 

The Grove!  In my time that big hotel hadn’t been built yet, so it spent a lot more time in sun.  This was always a great place for gathering and the fountain was fun too.
 

This is where the stage was when I saw the Mosquitones play.  They were a huge ska band and among their many members were several friends and two ex-boyfriends. I still have a t-shirt.
 

I absolutely adored this statue when it was first dedicated.
 

Now?  Eh.  It’s okay.
 

StoryCorps is in Portland!  Parked right outside City Hall, which has a sign advertising the Sesquicentennial. As I was taking this picture, a random lady said something anti-government about the presence of City Hall.  So Boise!
 

The Egyptian Theater where I first saw A Christmas Story as well as many other movies.  The last time I went there with my mother I convinced her to sit all the way in the very back row in the balcony because “how often do you get to sit this far away from a movie screen these days?”
 

If I still lived in Boise, I could see Gone with the Wind there.  The Egyptian is the perfect theater to see movies of that type.
 

Goldy’s, which was once upon a time a Chinese restaurant and which a group of friends descended upon one night because our friend was working.  The owners were not at all thrilled to have our business.
 

Where I bought my first pair of running shoes, once I decided that maybe running was okay after all.
 

This was a fancy Italian restaurant called the Renaissance.  I only went there once, with my family, for my 16th birthday, but it was very memorable.
 

C.W. Moore Park!  I can remember visiting when it was “the new park” (another mom-planned summer outing) and I loved that it was a place to preserve some parts of the architectural heritage of Boise.  Even then I was a sucker for old buildings.
 

We loved the water wheel.  I don’t think the fence was originally there.
 

 

Site of the dinner part of my 10-year reunion.  I loved growing up around the Basques.  All those vowels in their name!  And their cultural festival, Jaialdi, was a great place to watch boys and eat delicious bread.
 

These three things were not part of my existence in Boise.  I’ve never set foot in Hannah’s (a.k.a. Humpin’ Hannah’s) because I was too young to drink when I lived in Boise. I don’t think the other buildings had been built.  Maybe the Key Bank building.
 

Oh Bogies.   Why must you still exist when the Zoo was so short lived?  The Zoo was this great club with a punk rock vibe.  It had black and white zebra-striped walls and an upstairs where you could look out at the club through bars like you were a cage at the zoo.  Get it?  Tannar’s band played here and I think it was still the Zoo, but by the time we saw Primus, it was Bogies.  I have the ticket pasted in my journal as evidence.
 

This sign on the door of Bogies made me laugh aloud.
 

This dude was trucking up the street.  I loved how fast he was walking in the heat and I loved his very unsporting outfit.
 

Hey!  What are Oregon berries doing at the Boise Farmers Market?
 

This is entirely new.  I think it was just a parking lot before? No?
 

And there’s a huge thing going up across the street from it.
 

I like that there are seats so the old guys can watch the construction.  There were no old guys today, though.
 

According to this sign, the building looks like it will be chock full of artsy fun.
 

All of these boxes were painted downtown.  It was pretty awesome.
 

I asked my mom a while ago if the 8th Street Marketplace still existed.  She wasn’t sure.  But here it is.  Although the two-screen movie theater where I saw Back to the Future, Far and Away, and Jerry Maguire (and many more) has gone.
 

But Cafe Ole is still there! Cafe Ole is where you can get good Mexican food, but also where my Aunt once left a glove and we lounged about, sighing while we waited for her to go get it.
 

Isn’t this a great location?  There’s also one by the mall where I went on a date with a guy who never became my boyfriend.  This location was the site of the last sighting of boyfriend #2.  I was in town for a wedding in 2000 and we arranged to meet up at the restaurant after it closed.  We were chattering away when his girlfriend called and shrieked at him to come home now and I haven’t heard a word from him since.
 

There was an awesome coffee shop in this building.  It was the first place I ever ate potato dill soup.
 

Dunkley Music is where my parents bought me my alto saxophone.
 

TableRock Brewery opened during my adolescence and my dad, who liked beer, took us all out to eat there.  It was my first brewpub experience, though I just had a sandwich, not any beer.  I was probably 14. Oh wait, the website says 1991 so I was 16 or so.
 

Once upon a time this was a Haagen Dazs and then it morphed into something like a coffee shop.  But they had a Volkswagen Bug sitting in the corner of the place.  It was so cool!
 

O! Bon Marche.  You were such a sophisticated store.  You can tell from the still-awesome gold grating on the front. It had escalators and seemed huge.  I think it even had a cafe where you could get a cinnamon roll.
 

I love this art box.
 

Earlier in the day I saw someone with a leaf blower.  This guy was watering all the planters.  It takes a lot of maintenance to keep this downtown pretty.
 

This was Lerners, which I discovered as a teenager who was just starting to develop her own sense of style. I got some good pieces here.

And thus ends our tour nostalgic tour of buildings in downtown Boise.

Let’s talk about how lovely my lodgings are, shall we?  The Modern Hotel is a renovated Travelodge  in the “up and coming” (?) Linen District.  Some of the reviews I read (after I made my reservations) criticized it for being a sort of “lipstick on a pig” place and said the walls were thin.  I found the renovations to be handily done and the only place I could hear that other people were next to me was through the bathroom wall. It was quiet, clean and in a great location.

My room, looking all mid-century modern.  The bathroom had a tile shower with a rain shower shower head.  The room was very aesthetically pleasing.
 

This courtyard was a great place to pass the time, even in the 100-degree heat.
 

The bar made top-notch cocktails and the food was good too.
 

Overall, it was a very pretty place.
 

At night, there is fire!
 

The city of Boise is 150 years old!  The Sesqui-Shop is downtown and has exhibits about the city’s history.  There is also a celebration on July 7 which I will miss, and am quite sad about.

This is a fabulous map of the city limits through the years.  I learned that my house only became part of the city in 1963.
 

A taxi map from the 50s doesn’t even include my childhood neighborhood.   Probably because it was still the gleam in the eye of the developer who built it.
 

Idaho Blueprint and Supply is still in existence!
 

I would be to the left of section 140.

I had a good time at the Sesqui-Shop and even bought a pin to wear on July 7. Happy 150, Boise!

The bar at Fork.
 

Janet lived in the house across the street from me when I was growing up.  She had two children in the same age demographic as my family.  We spent a lot of time together during the elementary school years.  I met Janet for lunch and we caught up.

It was great fun.

For those not in the know, the Boise Greenbelt is a 25 mile tree-lined (although not so much after you get out of the city) path that follows the Boise River.

My mother was the kind of mother who planned outings for us during the summer and so I have happy childhood memories of walking down the Greenbelt to find a nice place to play in the Boise River.  And the memories just keep on coming.

Here’s the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial that was built after I left town.

Before that section of land was claimed for Human Rights it used to be a dead end street with a lot of parking spaces.  I spent way too much time watching a certain boyfriend skate.  Which was boring even then, and I liked him.

I can remember after they got the new bridge built and this became a pedestrian bridge how we marveled that it had ever been big enough for two lanes of traffic.
 

The Greenbelt is heavily utilized, as evidenced by these mirrors, handy for merging.
 

First sight of the river.  It has a smell to it I had forgotten about.  After I grew up into a teenager, we started floating the river, first with parents, then on our own.  And one very hot night, sometime in high school, four of us came down in the pitch dark and went swimming.  It was an exhilarating relief.
 

Despite the heat, it’s pleasant to walk beneath the trees.
 

I had completely forgotten about these signs and was happy to see they are still here.
 

The Discovery Center placed them to scale along the Greenbelt. As you walk you get a sense of how far apart the planets are.
 

Walking back to the hotel, I learned that my current hometown band will be visiting my former hometown quite soon.
 

And I could not resist taking a picture of this green car which was revving his engine in a very familiar (and still annoying) way.
 

The Flicks!  Still the same!  Still has video (and now DVD) rental!  Still has a cafe!  Still has two theaters where I saw so many very good movies! (Secret of Roan Inish, Jeffery, Kids, Dazed and Confused, Emma, the list goes on.)
 

Sara and I in front of the movie poster.  We saw the first movie in the series together (with Cindy at Cindy’s house) and it was her idea to wait and see the newest one when we were in Boise together.
 

After, Shawn met up with us and we went to the Modern Hotel Bar for some cocktails.