The Building on Main Street That Still Thinks It’s 1927

BOISE, ID—There is a building on the corner of Main and Seventh that has never quite accepted that the movie-palace era ended. The Egyptian Theatre, at 700 Main Street, opened during the 1920s, when American cities were in the middle of a brief, glorious competition to build the most theatrical possible containers for watching films.

Architects leaned into Egyptian Revival motifs—columns, hieroglyphic ornament, stylized figures—because the era felt like one worth dressing up for, and so did the buildings. Boise got its version.

The structure opened as the Egyptian Theatre and was later known in historic records as the Ada Theatre, but it has stayed planted on Main Street ever since, its façade making everyone who walks past feel slightly underdressed. Architectural drawings from the building’s history show a floor plan with a proper balcony level—a feature that placed it firmly in the tradition of genuine picture palaces rather than the simple storefront theaters that served smaller towns.

The foyer’s north wall carried ornamental detail that communicated something important: you were arriving somewhere, not just sitting down. What makes a building like this survive while so many of its contemporaries did not is a question worth sitting with.

Most movie palaces across the country were demolished in the second half of the twentieth century, victims of changing tastes, suburban migration, and the economics of maintaining a room built for spectacle. The Egyptian kept going.

Today it functions as a performing arts venue, which means the building’s original instinct—that this corner of downtown should host something worth attending—turned out to be correct. The neighborhood changed around it several times over.

The Egyptian mostly just watched. It remains one of the few places in Boise where the architecture itself is making an argument: that showing up should involve some effort, and that a room can have opinions about how you spend your evening.