The workaround became the show: paella went outside because the kitchen had none.
The Rundowntoday in 40 seconds
- 01Free at the gate all three days; Friday is the only hard ticket.
- 02Red Flag warning is for the mountains; the valley just gets wind.
- 03Friday noon on Grove: chorizo-and-seafood paella that can sell out before it's done.
- 04SEL swapped a 170K Boise plant for a 103K Nampa box: 250 jobs.
- 0547th Hyde Park fair is free; the shuttle only runs Sunday.
Today's Edition
Two weekends in a row, this town got told to pack a raincoat and mind the smoke. Not this one. After a windy Thursday and a Red Flag Warning that lives up in the mountains — not down here — the valley gets three clean days: sunny, seventies climbing to eighties, nothing hanging over any of it.
That's the frame for everything else today. Two festivals open Friday within a couple miles of each other, and the thing worth knowing about both is money — what's free, when it stops being free, and where you actually park. Arts & Culture reads the ticket math at Ann Morrison; Family Budget runs the same arithmetic at Camel's Back. And The Table has the sidewalk show at noon on Grove, the one that started because a kitchen had no room. Local Hustle has the factory that switched cities on the way to the floor.
Spend the sun. Nobody's charging for that part.
Two festivals, one sidewalk paella, three days of sun — and the sun is the only thing that's free everywhere.
— The Editor
The morning cover — one frame for the whole edition
ARTS & CULTURE
Boise Pride turns 37, and the gate costs nothing
Three days at Ann Morrison, one hard ticket, and a $10 clock on Saturday you'll want to beat.
The entrance to Ann Morrison this weekend costs you exactly nothing, all three days, which is not how anybody expects a festival this size to work. You picture a wall of money at the gate. There isn't one. Boise Pride's 37th year runs Friday through Sunday, the theme is LOUDER THAN FEAR, and every dollar lives inside the park instead of at the edge of it.
Gates open at 5 p.m. Friday, and the performance area is where the ticket applies — those start at $19.65. That gets you Chrissy Chlapecka at 7:30 and the DJ set from Trixie Mattel at 8:20, with Josh Pew opening at five, Black Velvet featuring Corevette at 6:45, and a run of local drag filling the slots between. The festival closes at 9:30. It's the only hard ticket of the whole weekend, so if you're buying one, buy this.
Gates at 10:30 a.m. The ticketed area stays free until 6 p.m., then a $10 cover kicks in — except anyone already inside before six stays free. A 5:45 arrival and a 6:15 arrival are two different Saturdays. The daytime is the surprise: a Louder Than Fear yoga practice from Doug at PNW Bear Yoga at 11:05, Ballet Folklorico Mexico Lindo at 1:40, line dancing, the cast of Dear Evan Hansen at 2:30, Priyanka at 5:30, Debby Holiday at 7, and Pattie Gonia closing at 8. Fireworks at 9 p.m., in memory of Laurie Tomlinson.
Sunday costs nothing at any hour. The parade steps off at 10 on River St, Juno Birch caps the day at 4:10, and gates close at 5. The organizers ask a suggested $10 a day Saturday and Sunday from anyone able, which is a suggestion and not a turnstile. Ann Morrison Park, 1000 S. Americana. In the festival's own words on its site: “In a time of renewed challenges, we gather in resilience, visibility, and belonging.”
A festival this size, and the only wall of money is inside the park.
Source · Boise Pride Festival
THE FORECAST
83° / 56°
The Red Flag has Boise's name on it. It's not for Boise.
MOOD OF THE SKY: RESTLESS. The word Boise sits inside a Red Flag Warning this morning, and if that headline talked you out of an afternoon at Camel's Back, put the plan back on the calendar. The warning runs noon to 9 tonight, and it belongs to the Boise Mountains — the high country, where a chance of thunderstorms lands on dry fuel and something catches. Down here on the valley floor the zone forecast carries no hazard at all. What you get is wind.
That wind is the whole day. High near 83, a 20 percent shot at a thunderstorm between noon and 2, and south gusts that peak around 30 through the afternoon. Thirty will move an umbrella and walk off with a folding table off your back porch — a nuisance, nothing more. Want proof the ground out there is tinder? Look at the Cole Fire, reported at 4:26 p.m. Wednesday about a mile south of the railroad tracks near South Cole Road outside Kuna. Crews mapped it at 417 acres, stopped its forward run, and had control pegged for noon today. South of Kuna. Not looming over anybody.
Then the sky loses interest. Tonight settles to 56 with northwest gusts to 30 that fade after midnight. Friday, 75 and mostly sunny. Saturday, 78 and sunny. Sunday, 82 and sunny. No alerts, no fronts, no drama. Yesterday touched 81 against a normal of 80, and the record for the date is still that 95 from 1981. After the last two weekends, three clean days is a gift you take.
Carry a jacket for the wind this afternoon and leave it home Friday.
TODAY
83° / 56°
RESTLESS
TONIGHT
56°F
Partly Cloudy
TOMORROW
75°F
Mostly Sunny
Source · National Weather Service Boise
THE TABLE
THE TABLE
The best free show downtown started with a dead Wednesday
Paella on the Grove Street sidewalk, tomorrow at noon: chorizo and seafood.
A pan the size of a manhole cover, on a public sidewalk, because the kitchen had no room.
The pan is the size of a manhole cover, and it lives on the sidewalk because the kitchen at 608 W Grove has nowhere to put it. Tony Eiguren will be out there tomorrow at twelve, cooking paella in the open air, chorizo and seafood spitting into a rice you can smell from the corner. It reads like a stunt and isn't one. Slow Wednesdays needed a fix, and the smell turned out to be the whole ad campaign.
The Basque Market cooks paella outside every Wednesday and Friday at noon, weather be damned. “One of our pivots was, how are we going to get people in on a Wednesday? Because those are slow. So we started doing it outside,” Tara Eiguren told BoiseDev. Her husband, per the same interview: “Because there's no space inside.” So they carried the pan to the curb, and in summer the thing sells out before it's even done. Come hungry and come early, because the chorizo-and-seafood pan does not wait for stragglers.
Dan Ansotegui started all of it. He opened Bar Gernika in 1991, then the Market in December 1999, after a planned open-air Basque market couldn't fill separate storefronts for a butcher, a cheese shop, a wine store. He catered his first paella in 2000 — about thirty people, working from Penelope Casas's cookbook Paella. Tony and Tara bought the place in 2006 and are marking twenty years of ownership this year. Their daughter Itaxso means to take it over. The tables were built oversized on purpose. “It's dinner and a show,” Tara told BoiseDev.
What to order: • If you're undecided: walk up for the Friday paella at noon — it's the whole reason to stand on that sidewalk, and it can vanish before it hits a plate. • If you want the full experience: come back for pintxo hour, 4 to 6 p.m., and take a seat at a big table next to people you haven't met yet. • If you already know what you want: get there before noon. In summer the pan empties before the rice is ready, and you cannot argue with an empty pan.
Bring: anyone who likes eating shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. Come ready to eat elbow-to-elbow with strangers.
📍 The Basque Market, 608 W Grove St, Boise 🕒 Open from 11 a.m. today; pintxo hour 4–6 p.m.; paella Wednesday and Friday at noon 💰 Walk-up sidewalk paella; no set menu price published ★ Best value: the Friday paella at noon, if you get there before it's gone
The next paella-cooking class is Tuesday the 22nd, and it's already sold out. A pan that draws a crowd on the sidewalk fills a classroom too.
— Nina's Table: a dead Wednesday grew the best free show downtown — go stand on the curb and let the smell do the talking.
Source · BoiseDev
LOCAL HUSTLE
Boise for months. Then SEL
bought a dead Nampa box.
SEL's next plant landed on Galleria Drive: 250 jobs, $26 to start.
For months, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories told us its next plant was headed to Boise — 170,000 square feet, part of a three-pronged expansion. On Tuesday the Pullman company closed on a 103,000-square-foot box in Nampa instead. Same expansion we'd been promised, smaller footprint, and a different city than the one on the earlier map.
A Macy's, then a bankruptcy, now a factory floor
The building on Galleria Drive has worn a few hats. It was a Macy's. Then it housed a robotics outfit, House of Design, before that company went bankrupt. By August it sat as a $15.5 million listing nobody had picked up. SEL — the folks who make the power-line protection tech that keeps grids from blacking out — is about to turn all that empty square footage into a working factory floor.
The number a job-seeker can actually use is $26
Roughly 250 manufacturing jobs are coming with it. SEL says $26 an hour is where the wage starts, with shift differentials of up to $10 more on top. SEL puts the whole thing at over $150 million counting the building and the equipment, with the facility running sometime in 2027. Nobody has said why Boise turned into Nampa, and nothing in the announcement explains it.
Founder and chairman Dr. Ed Schweitzer, in the company's release, said he's “especially pleased to see SEL continue investing in Idaho.” That's SEL's own pitch, and it's a real one for anyone in Canyon County chasing $26-an-hour work — it just lands in 2027, not this weekend. Watch the build-out timeline on Galleria Drive between now and then, and watch whether that 170,000-to-103,000 shrink means the Boise piece resurfaces somewhere else.
A Macy's, then a bankrupt robotics firm, then $15.5 million nobody paid. Next up, a factory.
Source · BoiseDev
boise.term — zsh — 120×40
$ boise --today --topic=family budget
> Free for the whole family. The cost is getting there.
You can walk your whole family into the Hyde Park Street Fair for zero dollars, all three days, and nobody at the gate blinks. Then you try to park, and the free afternoon turns into an hour of circling the North End, because nothing parks inside Camel's Back Park and the streets around it are thin.
The fair's back at Camel's Back September 18 through 20 in its 47th year. More than 200 vendors of handmade goods and artwork. A bigger food court than last year, two beverage tents, and a dome running yoga, sound baths and drum circles. Hours are Friday 4 to 9:30, Saturday 10 to 9:30, Sunday 10 to 7. Every dollar you spend inside is optional — the food, the drinks, whatever a kid falls in love with at a booth. Nobody charges you to walk in.
Now the part worth saying twice. The park-and-ride is at Lincoln Early Learning Center, 300 Fort Street, and the shuttle from it runs Sunday only. Sunday only. Friday and Saturday, that lot is a park-and-walk — or you take a bus or a bike and skip driving into it entirely. NENA volunteer Autumn Street, in an interview with Idaho News 6, said the fair has a new focus on everything local, with almost all of its vendors local to the Treasure Valley. That fits what this thing actually is: the North End Neighborhood Association's biggest fundraiser, going since 1979, run by volunteers instead of a promoter. The money funds school grants and street-safety projects.
Sunday runs late this year for one reason, and her name is Eilen Jewell — Boise's own, on the main stage at 5:35 p.m. The fair stretched its hours to fit her in.
Admission is free at Camel's Back Park, and everything past that is a choice you get to make. Give it as much of three days as you want; the weather cooperates, 75 and sunny Friday and 82 by Sunday. A bored kid gets 200-plus vendors, a food court and a dome full of drum circles, which holds an afternoon easy. Go — but on Friday or Saturday, leave the car home and bike or bus in from that Fort Street lot, because the shuttle doesn't roll until Sunday. Been this year? Reply with the one thing you bought that you never planned to.
/* You can walk the whole family in for zero dollars. Then you try to park. */
Source · Idaho News 6
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