For downtown Idaho Falls, the darkest days may have been in 1987.
The last department stores, The Bon Marche and J.C. Penney, had left for the Grand Teton Mall. The Paramount Theater was closed, it’s worn and ratty seats gather-ing dust in the dark. A “slum and blight” classification for the west end of A Street seemed likely.
Twenty-five years later, however, the lights are back on.
The Paramount reopened as the Colonial Theater in 1998, part of the $4.3 million Miles and Virginia Willard Arts Center. And although the days of big downtown department stores may be over, specialty stores such as MarCellar’s, Pandora’s Baubles and Beads, Lyn’s and The Yarn Connection have moved in to fill the retail void. Restaurants like the SnakeBite, Il Castillo, Pachanga’s and That One Place offer a local culinary alternative to the generic sameness of chain restaurants. Live music at places like Vino Rosso, Karen’s Park Avenue Club and The Celt are bringing people back in the evening. And by the end of this year, downtown boosters hope to see greater walking traffic between the Snake River Greenbelt and the business district with the completion of the Memorial Drive remodel. With Great Harvest Bread Co. on A Street, John VanOrman has had a stake in downtown Idaho Falls since 1995. As a retailer, property owner and a longtime member of the Downtown Development Corp., he has a broad view of what makes a downtown district vibrant, what expecta-tions are reasonable and what challenges are particularly difficult.
Asked to give downtown Idaho Falls a score on a scale of 1 to 10, he rates it “a solid 7,” but qualified it by saying “there are pockets that are doing very well, but it’s hard to give it a single score.”
VanOrman opened where he did based on some solid retailers on the block, such as Ingram’s Jewelers, Idaho Mountain Trading and Paper Bag Princess (now gone).
“Everybody is in there running their store every day,” he said. “Over the course of 10, 15 or 20 years, it takes its toll.”
What downtown has going for it most of all is a sense of time and place that people find appealing. When the stucco began peeling off the east side of the Great Harvest wall, it revealed an entire wall covered with lettering for the Idaho Falls Development Co., which, going by old title records, occupied the building from 1907 to 1912. Rather than painting over the wall, VanOrman chose to restore the wall. People responded by bringing in maps and old photos.
“People feel like they have a stake in downtown,” he said.
As executive director of the Downtown Development Corp., Bob Everhart says he is receiving more and more phone calls. “They’re people who say, ‘I have a business, I am relocating or I have a business I want to start,’” he said.
Like VanOrman, he rated downtown Idaho Falls a 7, adding, “We have some challenges as far as making this a 9.”
Things are going well on the commercial leasing front, he said. Thanks to the Colonial and various galleries, “the arts are doing very well and entertainment is getting better all the time.” Downtown is a natural place for specialty retail, places like Jimmy’s All Seasons-Angler. “This is where you find something different from what you’re going to find in the mall.”
The real missing piece of the puzzle is residential, Everhart said. There is a market for Tribeca-style loft units, and there are plenty of downtown properties that would lend themselves to that type of development. “All it is going to take is someone with vision and money,” he said.
The phone inquiries about residential come from two types of people. “We hear from young professionals without children, and then there is the empty-nester who says, ‘I never want to see a lawnmower again,’” he said.
One of the more noticeable developments has come with facade improvements. The city of Idaho Falls administers Community Development Block Grant money each year toward this, but the allocations have been lined up through 2015. Other property owners, like Lisa and Steve Fischbach of MCS Advertising, are moving forward on their own. In September 2011, when they bought their building on the southwest corner of Park Avenue and B Street, they resolved to remove the hideous ‘60s-era siding and restore the building to what it looked like in the ‘20s.
They had attended a seminar on advertis-ing agency principles, where a speaker had recommended having one’s own place. For MCS, which had been leasing an office on Constitution Way, staying downtown was an easy decision. “We love it downtown and want to be part of the community,” Lisa Fischbach said.
Still, renovating an old building is bound to be a project with special challenges. Janice and Jim McGeachin, who opened up The Celt Pub at the corner of Broadway and Park Avenue, estimate they did 60 to 70 percent more work than they originally planned.
“When you start peeling away layers, you find all sorts of surprises,” Janice McGeachin said. For instance, the famous wagon wheel windows of the old Hub Bar had virtually no structural support.
By the time they opened in August, the cost ended up being 20 to 30 percent higher than they anticipated, but quality pays its own dividends. “We built as investors. If you do it right, it will last and hold up,” she said.
McGeachin, who is the Downtown Development Corp. board chair this year, said she is very confident in the district’s growth and potential. “It’s getting to be a pretty busy place on certain days,” she said.
Likewise, when people from out of state are interested in a city, it’s the downtown that they want to see. “They always want to know about Irish pubs and Italian restau-rants,” McGeachin said. “They’ll ask about downtown landmarks.”
Brad Cramer of the city of Idaho Falls Planning Department, said he remembers when downtown was a dead zone. In high school, “The only time I came downtown was to pick up a tux,” he said.
That was the early 1990s. Now, “If I’m going to go out to dinner with my wife this is the first place I look,” he said. “There’s something to come to now.”