With a Warm Springs Avenue historic homes tour scheduled for Sunday, it seems an appropriate time to review the history of this Boise neighborhood. It is both a Boise City historic district and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural distinction as well as its history.
Originally a primitive dirt road that led from Downtown to a primitive hot springs resort east of Table Rock, Warm Springs Road became Warm Springs Avenue after 1890 when prominent Boise businessmen formed the Artesian Hot and Cold Water Co. and began to drill for hot water at a site near the 1870 Idaho Penitentiary. This was on the west side of Table Rock, about five miles from the center of town.
The plan was to create a high-class, residential thoroughfare with houses heated by hot water from the new well. The development made international geothermal history when banker C.W. Moore's big brick mansion at the corner of Warm Springs and Walnut became the first house in the United States heated with natural hot water.
Historian Merle Wells described the international significance of Boise's system: "Geothermal power was developed commercially in Italy in 1904, and later in New Zealand and Iceland, as well as in a number of other places. Boise's pioneering system provided an important model for these international applications of hot water heat"
Eager to expand the use of their new hot water system, the company founders visited Helena, Mont., where a great indoor natatorium in a style called "Moorish" was a popular and profitable attraction. They hired John C. Paulsen, its German-born architect, to come to Boise and design a natatorium for them near the end of Warm Springs Avenue.
The finished building was in the exotic Moorish style, with twin towers six stories high and a swimming pool 125 feet long.
With Turkish baths, a saloon and a dance floor where live music was played nightly by a resident orchestra, the "Nat," as Boiseans always called it, was an instant success.
To get people there from Downtown, its promoters also built one of the first electric streetcar systems in the western states.
After the hot water system was finished, and the natatorium and streetcar system were up and running, what had once been open farm fields and orchards, with only a few dwelling houses, barns and outbuildings, was soon subdivided into building lots.
Houses of many styles and sizes were built, beginning with C.W. Moore's mansion in the French Chateau style. It was soon followed in the 1890s by other fine houses in the Queen Anne style, with corner towers, wrap-around porches, and fancy cut shingle surfaces.
The avenue became a veritable museum of 19th and 20th century styles. The towered Queen Anne was followed by Colonial Revival, bungalow, English Tudor, and the California Mission style with stucco surfaces and tile roofs.
Another amenity of life on the avenue was plentiful river water for irrigation, supplied by the Grove Street ditch that ran behind all the houses on the south side of the street. Some owners had their own water wheels for lifting the water to the level of their upper gardens, and all had extensive pasturelands to the south.
Most of the stables and carriage houses also were below the ditch. Both U.S. Census figures and early city directories confirm that most of the wealthy families that built houses on the avenue in the '90s had gardeners and other servants.
The gardener was usually Chinese, and some families had a Chinese cook as well.
Nearly all of the stone used in Warm Springs Avenue houses was quarried at Table Rock, the prominent sandstone mesa at the east end of the neighborhood.
For a more complete overview of the city's architectural styles and of the people who built and lived in the houses on Warm Springs Avenue, see this author's "Historic Boise" and a companion volume "The Boiseans at Home." Proceeds from their sale go to the College of Idaho.
Arthur Hart writes this column on Idaho history for the Idaho Statesman. It appears each Tuesday in the Life section. Reach him by e-mail at life@idahostatesman.com.
