For today’s #TBT we feature the Elks Temple, or Elks Building located at the corner of 9th & Jefferson in downtown Boise.

“The Elks Temple is a four-story brick building in a modified Italian palazzo style. It is five bays wide and distinguished by its Boise sandstone trim and large cornice with geometric decorative elements that seem to hang from the brackets.

The Ninth Street side, the result of the 1923-24 addition, follows the Jefferson Street façade’s details. However, it is further enhanced with a brick relief ornamentation on the second story.

A bronze Elk’s head with light globes at the points of its rack [was] centered between the second and third floors. [editor’s note: the Elk’s head was removed when the Boise Elks relocated to another temple building]

The Elks Temple is architecturally significant as a good example of the peculiar cornice style used by Tourtellotte & Hummel on a commercial building. Rising a full four stories, the structure dominated the intersection of Jefferson and Ninth Streets. With its large cornice…the building is a Boise landmark and one of the city’s better buildings from the pre-WWI period.

Boise’s Elk’s Lodge was organized in 1896 and in 1913 the left three bays of the present structure were erected. In 1923 the lodge had gained sufficiently in numbers to build an annex consisting of the two right-hand bays. The building has been the victim of several fires, with the most disastrous gutting the interior on February 22, 1943.” (from National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, October 1977) The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.