St. Luke’s sought to save 10 historic homes when it expanded. 2 got demolished
In 2018, St. Luke’s Health Systems announced that as part of expansion, it would move up to 10 historic houses off its land and save them from the wrecking ball.
Now, two of those houses have been demolished.
It’s not for lack of trying, says Kerry Calverley, who with her husband, Steve, bought six of the houses formerly owned by St. Luke’s. They’re the sort of eclectic homes that once lined the streets of Boise’s East End — one with a Spanish red-tiled roof, another a colonial with a brick fireplace and warped glass windows.
Over the course of February 2019, the Calverleys’ company, Reclaimed Structures, spent thousands of dollars to buy and move the houses, most of which were built between 1900 and 1935.
Their final resting place, Calverley hoped, would be a parcel she’d looked to buy in the East End that she would call Preservation Park. But just before Calverley planned to move the houses there, the land deal fell through.
“We had to go to plan B,” Calverley said in an interview.
With St. Luke’s under its own tight timeline to get construction started, Calverley had move fast to find a place to store the houses. She worked out a deal with the Idaho State Historical Society, which was leasing land to the College of Western Idaho near the Old Idaho Penitentiary on Warm Springs Avenue. For a fee, the historical society and CWI allowed the Calverleys to sublease the land, using it as a temporary site for the houses until they could find a “forever home.”
Since then, Calverley has tried to find other pieces of land and buyers.
Moving a century-old house once is hard. Finding a buyer who wants to move it again — and then pay to remodel it — is even harder.
“What we learned is that there isn’t anybody who is going to take on that process,” Calverley said.
At different points, she had two people interested in the houses. “They looked at it and said, ‘We’re going to lose money on this.’ You’re looking at about $50,000 just to move a house,” she said. “And that’s before even the ground below and the foundation.”
On top of that, her lease was running out: CWI needed her houses off the property by the end of the year.
So this month, Calverley decided to demolish two of the six houses — a one-story Tudor formerly at 174 W. Jefferson and a two-story saltbox-style house formerly at 115 W. Jefferson.
“One in particular, it was in a dilapidated state. It was something that wasn’t easily salvageable,” Calverley said. “It made my stomach hurt that we had to do that.”
Photos of the torn-down houses circulated on Facebook and social media site NextDoor. Neighbors were outraged that what had started out as a promise to save historic homes had ended with demolition.
“So, these ‘issues’ weren’t known beforehand?” wrote one Boisean on the Facebook page Vanishing Boise. “It’s the classic ‘bait-and-switch’ routine to me.”
But Paula Benson, president of Preservation Idaho, credited the Calverleys with working hard to save all six houses.
“When it came down to getting them ready to move, the houses wouldn’t have withstood the move and the costs involved,” she said. “If those buildings were still on site, they probably could have been rehabbed.”
Benson said she appreciated St. Luke’s willingness to move the houses rather than demolish them outright, but said preservation groups always prefer that structures remain on the sites where they were built. Sites have their own historical context, she said.
“The Calverleys took this on because they believe in historic homes,” she said. “For them, demolition is a truly last-case scenario.”
This isn’t the first time that a new owner of an old Boise building has promised preservation only to end up with little of the original structure intact. In September, neighbors were shocked to find that Roosevelt Market, which its new owners Jill Simplot and her mother, Pam Lemley, promised to restore to its former glory, had been stripped to its studs. Simplot’s architect argued the building was too dilapidated to restore.
“The solution is to have property owners take care of buildings,” Benson said.
But Boise lacks the tradition of caring for historic homes that’s ingrained in many older cities, she said. “We call that demolition by neglect,” Benson said.
St. Luke’s took care of its properties, said spokeswoman Anita Kissee. The houses were used in some cases as offices, others as day care centers.
“We chose Reclaimed Structures because the contractors wanted to take the whole lot of buildings, including a half dozen more buildings that Reclaimed Structures had originally hoped to move but later backed out of taking,” Kissee said. “We also appreciated that they intended to preserve and restore the buildings to their original intended use as homes.”
What of the remaining houses?
Of the six houses Calverley bought, four will become homes for new owners. One was moved to the Bench neighborhood last winter. Two others were recently moved from the Old Penitentiary to a site across the street, near the Warm Springs Golf Course. One will be moved before the end of the year to East Bannock and Coston streets, just off of Warm Springs Avenue near the Natatorium.
St. Luke’s kept two of 10 ten houses that it promised to save, including the two-story Fred Reiger House, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. That house and the 1935 Bishop Foote Guest House were moved in August to a lot at Avenue B and Bannock Street.
“They’re going to remain unoccupied until we can determine best use,” Kissee said. “We want to be respectful to neighbors and make sure the right use is what happens.”
Private parties purchased the other two homes and relocated them.
Where those residential blocks once stood, St. Luke’s has been constructing a new parking garage, a shipping and receiving building and a children’s pavilion.
Calverley said she did what she could.
“All six of these of these houses could have been gone,” Calverley said. “We loved the prospect of being able to find new homes for these houses.”
174 W. Jefferson St.
The Calverleys moved this Tudor cottage from St. Luke’s Downtown Boise campus up to an interim site at the Old Idaho Penitentiary, but ultimately could not find a new buyer and demolished it:
115 W. Jefferson St.
They also moved this saltbox-style house from 115 W. Jefferson St. but also ended up demolishing it:
105 W. State St.
The Calverleys moved this Tudor duplex from Downtown to a lot on the Bench:
This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 1:43 PM.
