Bryant, H. H., Garage

The H. H. Bryant Garage is architecturally and historically significant as a very large-scale icon of the burgeoning auto age, as an example of the very stylized commercial classical style noted in a number of sites from the 1910s, and as a further example of a long-term relationship between the firm and a client.

In the mid-1910s the rapidly increasing private ownership of automobiles resulted in ambitious "auto palaces" for their sale and maintenance in a number of Idaho towns. The Bryant garage, surviving just south and west of Boise's urban renewal area, is the city's largest and best of these. The symmetry, corner pediments, and pilasters which distinguish this facade are classically derived; the geometric brickwork of the corner bays and the curiously dropped pilaster caps (reminiscent of forms on the slightly earlier Elks Temple across town), are the clearest statement to the time of the abstract extrapolation from that classical derivation which much commercial architecture would be taking.

Charles Storey and Company executed the superstructure contract for the garage in 1917 at a projected cost of $40,000. It was still the Bryant and Son Garage seventeen years later when the owners returned to Troutellotte and Hummel for the re-modeling which created a drive-through gas station under the intersection bays. Contractor J. 0. Jordan and Sons (who themselves commissioned a building, site 131, from these architects a few years later) carried out the second job at a cost projected at $3,000 on the building permit.