In May 1903, Theodore Roosevelt stood in Boise and offered a perspective that we have largely forgotten.
After traveling through the valley, he remarked: “I wish it were possible to take the whole city around on exhibition as an example from which many much older cities in older states could learn.” Roosevelt recognized that this beauty was a product of industry and intelligence. To him, Boise was proof of what happens when a community applies disciplined engineering and a sense of permanence to a desert. He challenged the citizens of that era to ensure that as the city grew, their handiwork would “add to and not mar the work of nature.”
His standard was a direct rejection of the “absentee” mindset. This was Roosevelt’s term for the impulse to exploit the land for a few years of profit before moving on. He wanted a city built for the “home maker.” He understood that the primary job of a city isn’t just to provide housing or commerce, but to provide the physical environment required to produce a capable and responsible citizen.
For a time, Boise accepted this challenge as a mandate for excellence. In 1916, the City Engineer looked at Harrison Boulevard—a thoroughfare designed with sweeping park strips and intersections bookended by street lamps—and declared it a “model road.” It was built to be stylish and sophisticated, prioritizing civic dignity over pure traffic efficiency. The boulevard was a container for citizenship, designed to anchor the community for the next century.
But over the following decades, the logic of the home maker was replaced by an extractive logic. We stopped building for the next century and started building for the next quarter. As the city grew, the corridors widened, but the thresholds—those essential buffers between our private lives and public speed—collapsed.
We see the result of this shift at Table Rock. What Roosevelt would have seen as the axis of our valley—the high point that orients the entire city—has been treated as a utility patch. We accepted the placement of towers and gravel on our most significant natural threshold because we stopped seeing the land as something to be “handed to our children in better shape than we got it.”
Boise Rising is an effort to resume the work Roosevelt recognized 123 years ago. We are recovering the original discipline of stewardship: the belief that we are responsible for building the streets, the places, and the civic conditions that make a straight and decent life possible.
Boise once set the example for the nation. There is no reason it cannot again.
