For today’s #tbt, we look back to one of our buildings that did not survive to the 21st century. The Overland/Eastman Building once stood at 8th & Main Street in downtown Boise.

The Overland Building (renamed the Eastman Building in 1927) was designed by Tourtelotte and Company on the site of the 1864 Overland House hotel. The firm fashioned a four-story palazzo in Second Renaissance Revival style with top-floor rounded windows beneath a cornice of terra cotta and festooned with smiling lion heads. Its terra cotta cornice, with more than a hundred lion heads, would be removed, and reinstalled whentwo additional floors were added in 1910.

In 1972, the Boise Redevelopment Agency, Capital City Development Corporation’s predecessor, acquired the property as part of the city’s urban renewal project. The building sat vacant and dilapidated for almost a decade. The building fell victim to arson on the night of January 23, 1987, just two days after developers announced plans to renovate the historic building. The gutted building had to be condemned and knocked down. Every lion head was partially shattered as they crashed to the pavement below. (You can still see one of the lion heads in a display in the Eighth and Main building).

The half-acre site was then the site of a temporary open-air market in the late 80s and then infamously the eyesore known as the “Boise Hole” for 24 years. The Eighth and Main building, Idaho’s tallest, is currently located on this site.

(sources: Images of America: Boise by Frank Thompson, 2009; Life in Old Boise by Arthur Hart, 1989; Idaho Statesman, “Boise Hole Goes to Court Again”, March 4, 2011)