Editor’s Note: This column originally was published on Dec. 16, 1997.

When The Grove hotel opens next week, crow should be on the menu.

Make it Crow Flambeau — for those of us who said the hotel would never be built.

Before it was a hotel, before it was a parking lot, before it was scraped earth and weeds, the site of The Grove hotel was the home of urban renewal’s best-known evictee.

His name was Billy Fong, and he was the last resident of downtown Boise’s Chinese community.

Small as it was, “Chinatown” gave downtown a touch of exotica and unexpected diversity. Then Fong was evicted, the Chinese buildings were razed and an era slipped into history.

Before he left town, Fong cursed the site of his former home. From then on, it was as if the soil had been sown with arsenic.

One hotel deal after another withered and died. The downtown hotel was supposed to have been a Sheraton, a Howard Johnson’s, an Embassy Suites and other fantasies. Fong’s revenge seemed complete.

Until now.

It was 1972 when urban renewal’s last holdout left a town that dreamed of becoming a city. Today, he wouldn’t recognize it. The Grove hotel is the last of a group of projects intended to make the dream happen. Planning reports referred to them as community goals and objectives. Skeptics called them impossible dreams.

One was a shopping mall. Every town big enough to support a water tower has a mall, but for Boise it was an impossible dream for two decades. We may have been the only city in America without an Orange Julius or a Wicks ‘N Sticks.

“We finally got our mall, but you have to wonder, “ former Mayor Jay Amyx said. “We used to complain about the traffic downtown. The mall traffic is worse than downtown ever was.”

Amyx was mayor in the late ’60s, when urban renewal was beginning. The mall was its Holy Grail, but “we also had some anchor points,” he said. “We were trying to get the downtown hotel, an auditorium and performing arts center, a pavilion and the crosstown highway.”

All impossible dreams.

Even with the Morrison Foundation paying much of the cost, voters defeated successive bond elections for the performing arts center. And it took state land and student fees to rescue the Pavilion. Both were supposed to have been downtown. If Boise State University hadn’t helped, we might not have them yet.

The Greater Boise Auditorium District was the butt of jokes. It held elections and meetings, commissioned plans and drawings, did everything but build an auditorium. Anyone who knew anything knew the auditorium was never going to happen. Today we know it as the Boise Centre on The Grove.

The Connector is another fable-now-reality. So is the mythical “third airline.” For what seemed like forever, Boise had only two — United and tiny West Coast. If you think it’s hard getting here now ...

With the last impossible dream about to open its doors, Amyx thinks “things turned out just fine. My first impression of Boise in 1938 was that it was a beautiful little town. Now it’s a city. But it’s still beautiful.”

It took 25 years, but the curse of Billy Fong appears to have been lifted.

The skeptics said it couldn’t happen.

Pass the crow, please.