Boise rallies around historic church
Community fund-raising efforts initiate neighborhood renovation
For two years, Jon Swarthout passed the aging and neglected former Immanuel Methodist Episcopal Church as he went about his business in Boise’s historic north end. He always had one question for the church’s owner: When will you sell it?
Last summer, the owner agreed it was time. At last, Swarthout’s dream of creating the Treasure Valley Institute for Children’s Arts (TrICA) had a home.
But buying the 100-year-old church at the corner of 14th and Eastman streets, now designated a brownfield by the state, was only the first step of an ongoing fundraising and cleanup process that has drawn on one man’s passion and a community’s support in helping him accomplish his ambitious plans.
Swarthout, 38, a former professional ballet dancer who heads up the Children’s Dance Institute in Boise, estimates it will take $3 million to renovate the once handsome church with boarded-up stained glass windows into a community space that houses everything from music, dance and recording studios to a children’s museum, children’s library and full theatrical stage. Doing so, promises not only to bring together the community, but also to redevelop another section of the Hyde Park area, an older neighborhood with a reputation for hip restaurants and quaint shops.
But before work starts, the church requires significant environmental cleanup. Once listed among the top five endangered historic sites by Preservation Idaho, the church not only suffered years of disrepair, but also had methamphetamine activity and lead contamination. The site was chosen by Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) as a pilot brownfield site participating in the state’s Community Reinvestment Pilot Initiative. As such, the project’s cleanup costs will be reimbursed at 70 percent, up to $150,000.
“We’re just happy we can be involved in a project that not only removes environmental barriers to redevelopment, but also helps in a small way to reduce blight in a neighborhood, contributes to the preservation of a historic building and, ultimately, helps create a children’s art center the community can be proud of,” says Aaron Scheff, DEQ’s Brownfields Response Program manager.
The J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation helped launch TrICA’s capital campaign in November with a $100,000 donation. The project also has attracted $400,000 worth of in-kind services—from architects and lawyers volunteering their time to local nurseries promising landscaping and plants. Hundreds of Boise children have chipped in $5 each to buy a fundraising shingle to help repair the church’s roof. And volunteers logged 600 hours in just three months time.
Swarthout, a fourth generation Idahoan with deep family roots in farming, calls it an “old fashioned barn raising.”
“By helping that one family, it would benefit the whole community,” he says.
Right now, Swarthout and his staff are busy approaching banks, writing grants and researching tax credits, with the goal of opening TrICA in 2010.
“There’s a sense of destiny that’s undeniable,” Swarthout says. “I knew somehow this needed to happen with this place.”
Go to http://www.preservationidaho.org/index.shtml to read more about the historic church and its transformation into a children’s art institute. Or go to www.tricarts.org to join the mailing list.
