The "Ghost Streetcar" of South Boise Station, Idaho

Once a trolley shelter on the verge of demolition, the South Boise Streetcar Station features a “ghost streetcar,” a skeletal sculpture designed to commemorate Boise’s trolley history.

Amidst the green grasses of Ivywild Park, a large recreational space in the southern end of Boise, Idaho, stands a bleached, skeletal phantom of a trolley car. This “ghost streetcar” is a to-scale installation sculpture designed by the Byron Folwell firm in 2012, and it features prominently as part of Ivywild Park’s South Boise Trolley Station Plaza, a refurbished trolley shelter that stands as one of the only remnants of the Boise Interurban.

Boise’s streetcar history began in 1891, a year after Idaho achieved statehood, when the Boise City Rapid Transit Company opened an electric rail line along Main Street. From there, Boise’s streetcar network underwent enormous growth; as new communities sprang up, a slew of private companies sought to build more lines and provide service to neighborhoods across the rapidly developing city. The exponential growth of Boise’s communities was intricately intertwined with the proliferation of the streetcar, an early example of what planners now call “transit-oriented development.”

Individual trolleys served communities throughout the Treasure Valley, including Boise and Caldwell, but there was a growing desire among Valley residents and investors alike to connect these disparate streetcar systems into one interurban network. The effort to create an interurban loop from these piecemeal trolleys began with Walter E. Pierce’s Boise Interurban Railway, which initiated construction of a link northward from Boise and Caldwell in 1905, with service beginning in 1907. Meanwhile, Donald Ustick and Robert Noble’s Boise Valley Railway extended southward to Nampa. The northern and southern interurban lines remained disconnected until 1912, when the Idaho Railway Light & Power Company purchased both companies and completed the Boise Valley Interurban Loop, operating streetcars along it as the Idaho Traction Company. Nearby hydroelectric dams supplied much of the power to this new interconnected trolley system.

A wide variety of people relied on the Interurban’s service for their needs, from students riding to the College of Idaho campus in Caldwell to farmers taking their produce to railroad stations. At its peak in 1920, the trolley cars had carried over two and a half million passengers. The trolley had been so foundational to building community in the Valley that local community boosters nicknamed the region’s semi-professional intercity baseball club the “Trolley League.” Despite this, however, the growing popularity of automobiles heralded the end of the Boise streetcar’s profitability. Gradually, buses replaced trolley lines, and the Idaho Power Company ceased all streetcar service from Boise to nearby cities in May of 1928.

The trolley shelter that had once housed streetcars in South Boise remained untouched for almost a century, the city letting it fall into disrepair and dilapidation. The shelter faced the prospect of demolition until 2012,  when three Boise city organizations - the Southeast Boise Neighborhood Association, the City of Boise Department of Arts & History, and the Boise Department of Parks and Recreation - endeavored to save the location from its grim fate. Employing the Byron Folwell design firm to create a life-size skeletal sculpture of a streetcar, the three organizations revitalized the shelter as a public historical attraction and community art piece, a monument to the streetcar history of Boise.

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