About Garden City
Garden City is almost completely surrounded by the city of Boise, and sits just one to two miles from Boise’s downtown. Garden City roughly follows the alignment of the Boise River. It falls between Chinden Boulevard, to the south, and State Street, to the north (just on the other side of the Boise River). The city was legally established in 1967, is only a total of about 4 square miles, and contains only about 5,000 older homes. The very few new homes are all on smaller in-fill parcels.
Garden City gets its name from the gardens that once filled the city, planted and cultivated by Chinese immigrants. They first came to the Boise area in the late and mid-1800’s for the gold rush, then stayed and became gardeners and farmers. (The prominent Chinden Boulevard is derived from the combination of the words “Chinese” and “Garden”, but there are no gardens or relics of the old China Town in place anymore.) Garden City reputedly became a bit of a rough town for many years, the location of opium dens and brothels.
Whatever its colorful history, over the last several decades, Garden City has attracted a lot of artists – traditional artists, metalworkers and the like, and craft brewers who sell in small tasting rooms throughout the area. Music venues and wine tasting rooms also dot Garden City, which now has a very “artsy” and eclectic energy. Garden City is also the site of the Idaho State Fairgrounds, site of the annual Western Idaho Fair, as well as the Boise Hawks Stadium (a minor league team with avid local supporters).
Most homes in Garden City are tucked just off of busy Chinden Boulevard. The traffic and noise give these neighborhoods a rather urban and semi-industrial feel. The big exception to this is the Riverside Village area, where homes sit directly on manmade lakes that feed from the Boise River, which passes nearby. There are both gated and non-gated neighborhoods on these lakes, all of them set in a quiet residential glen that feels very different from the rest of Garden City. These homes enjoy neighborhood facilities like a community pool. They are established older homes, but have tended to attract more of a professional population than the rest of this fascinating and evolving city.
