Warm Springs Avenue: The Street That Ran on Hot Water
Near Boise, Idaho
Warm Springs Avenue runs east from downtown through a quiet neighborhood of Victorian and Craftsman houses, and for most of its length it looks like any pleasant old residential street. But this block was the site of one of the most quietly radical experiments in American urban history: a neighborhood heated entirely from the earth.
In the eighteen eighties, drillers sinking wells east of town struck hot water. The wells produced naturally heated water at temperatures high enough for space heating, and a group of businessmen saw an opportunity. Christopher Moore, a Boise financier, built the first home on the avenue in eighteen ninety-two and had it heated by the geothermal water, among the first residences in the United States to use geothermal energy for home heating.
The Artesian Hot and Cold Water Company ran pipes down the street to neighboring houses. The men who controlled the water line built their mansions on the avenue: Queen Anne towers, Colonial Revival columns, Tudor Revival half-timbering. Within a decade, Warm Springs Avenue had replaced Grove Street as Boise's most prestigious address.
A streetcar line went in at the same time, running down the avenue to the famous Natatorium at the far eastern end, a resort pool fed by the same hot water, which drew Boiseans on summer evenings until a windstorm took the roof in nineteen thirty-four.
The homes on Warm Springs Avenue are still heated by geothermal water today. A handful of them have been on the same piped circuit since the eighteen nineties. Somewhere under this pavement, hot water is moving through old pipes, doing what it has always done.
